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Promotional & pricing analysis

Measure the revenue and margin impact of every promotion. Pull order data, join against your promo calendar and cost data, and compare promo vs non-promo performance.

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The prompt

I want to measure the impact of promotions and pricing changes on revenue and margin. Can you build me a flow that pulls order data from Shopify and Amazon, joins it against our promo calendar and cost data from Excel, calculates revenue and margin lift by promotion, and outputs a report comparing promo vs. non-promo performance?

Just copy and paste the prompt into a new Parabola flow to get started.

What Parabola builds

A workflow with seven steps you can edit:

1. Pull order data. Shopify orders, Amazon Seller Central transactions, marketplace settlements. Per line item, including the discount applied and the channel.

2. Pull the promo calendar. Each promotion has a start date, end date, eligible SKUs, discount level, and target channels. The calendar lives in a table.

3. Pull cost data. Per-SKU cost from NetSuite, your PLM, or an Excel cost file. Plus channel-specific fees for the margin calculation.

4. Tag each order line. Promo or non-promo, which promotion if so, channel, and product category.

5. Calculate revenue and margin. Gross revenue, net of discounts, less COGS, less channel fees. Per order line, then aggregated per promotion.

6. Compare against baseline. Same SKU in the equivalent non-promo window. Or year-over-year same week. Or sibling SKUs that did not promote. The baseline method is configurable.

7. Output the report. Per-promotion summary, SKU-level dig, alert when a promotion lost money, dashboard for the marketing-finance review.

Why teams stop doing this manually

Promotions look great on the channel dashboard. Revenue jumps. Conversion rate climbs. The campaign report shows the lift. What the channel dashboard does not show is the margin underneath. A 30% discount paired with a high-cost SKU and an Amazon referral fee can mean the promotion lost money even while revenue grew. Finance figures that out a month later, during the close, when the gross margin number does not tie out.

The manual version of this analysis takes a week. The analyst pulls every promo from the calendar, every order from the channels, every SKU cost, every channel fee. The joins are painful. The promo calendar lives in a spreadsheet someone owns. The cost file is a different spreadsheet, updated quarterly. By the time the analysis lands, the next promotion is already running.

The math is rule-based. Order net of discount, less COGS, less fees, against the baseline. Once the data is clean, the answer is clear. The work is the plumbing, and it repeats every cycle. That is exactly the kind of work that lives in a flow. Marketing sees the margin impact in days, not weeks. Finance is reading the same number.

How it works

Step 1. Paste the prompt.

Open Parabola, paste the prompt in section 2, and let it ask follow-up questions about your promo calendar, your cost data, and the baseline method your team uses.

Step 2. Connect your data.

API connections to Shopify and Amazon, plus the promo calendar spreadsheet, the cost file, and any channel fee schedule. Plus the SKU master.

Step 3. Run it weekly or per promo.

The flow refreshes against the latest data and outputs the report. Per promo, per week, or on-demand when marketing wants to size the next campaign.

Related prompts

FAQ

How does the flow handle stacked promotions (multiple discounts on the same order)?

Each discount line gets tagged at the order line level. The flow attributes revenue and margin impact per promotion based on the stacking rule. Configurable: equal split, last-promo wins, or proportional by discount value.

What about promotional pricing changes that go semi-permanent?

Add a price-change effective date to the promo calendar. The flow treats the period before as the baseline and the period after as the new normal. Margin impact gets reported on the transition window.

Can the flow factor in fulfillment cost differences between channels?

Yes. Channel fees and fulfillment cost per channel are configurable inputs. The margin calculation reflects the true channel-specific cost, not just the catalog cost.

How does it handle markdowns at end of season?

Markdowns are a category of promotion in the calendar. The flow tracks markdown depth, sell-through during markdown, and margin recovery. End-of-season cut compares planned markdown to actual.

How is this different from a marketing analytics dashboard?

Marketing dashboards optimize for revenue and lift. This flow includes the cost side, so the output is margin impact, not just revenue. Finance can sit at the same table as marketing.
Know the margin impact before the next promo runs.
Paste the prompt, point it at your channels, calendar, and cost file, and let the analysis refresh weekly.
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