I read the new Hurman and Klaviyo report so you don't have to. It's called Sugar High, it's 22 pages, and it's the most useful thing I've read on discounting in a long time.

Quick note up front: the deep data in the report comes from 176 Australian brands tracked by ProfitPeak over twelve months. The wider global numbers come from Klaviyo Insights across 7,618 brands. So some of the headline stats are ANZ-specific, and some are global. Where it matters, I'll flag it. The patterns absolutely hold for US DTC. The macro pressures, the AI search shift, the customer expectations, they're the same conversation.

Here's the report itself if you want to read the whole thing: . And below are the five numbers I'd pin on a sticky note if you're running a US Shopify brand at $250K to $1M.

1. 70% of discount events generate negative contribution profit

Seven out of ten promotional events make the business poorer on a contribution basis. Among brands that discount the most aggressively, it's nine out of ten.

What it means for US DTC: Your dashboard is lying to you in real time. ROAS goes up, units go up, conversion rate goes up. The contribution profit number, the one that subtracts COGS, fulfilment, and ad spend, is the one to actually watch. Most Shopify brands I work with don't have contribution profit on the main dashboard. They have revenue. That's how the discounting habit forms.

2. A 19-point margin gap between low and deep discounters

Brands that ran 11 or more sales in a year saw profit margins fall 11% year-on-year. Brands that ran five or fewer saw margins grow 8%. Same broad category. Same customer base. Different discount habits. 19-point margin gap.

What it means for US DTC: Black November plus Prime Day plus Memorial Day plus 4th of July plus back-to-school plus your own anniversary sale plus Black Friday plus Cyber Monday plus a December clearance plus a January cleanup. If you're tracking the US promotional calendar honestly, you're closer to 11+ events than 5. The data says that's costing you margin you'll never get back through volume.

3. 68% of discounted orders come from returning customers

This one's the kicker. Across all discount periods, 88% of orders went through with a discount. And of those discounted orders, 68% were placed by returning customers. At full price, returning customers only make up 11% of orders.

Translation: when you discount, you're not pulling in new buyers. You're giving the discount to people who would have paid full price anyway.

What it means for US DTC: This is where Klaviyo becomes the lever. If two-thirds of your sale traffic is people who'd have bought anyway, the problem isn't that you discount, it's that you discount everyone. Cohort your list. Send the discount to genuinely at-risk lapsing customers, not your VIP cohort. Most Shopify brands have Klaviyo and use a fraction of what it can do. The 70% you're not using is exactly the segmentation infrastructure that fixes this.

4. Topline revenue drops 27% in the 2-4 weeks after a sale

The sale week looks like growth. The four weeks after look like a graveyard. Average drop of 27% below the brand's normal baseline. Not below the inflated sale week. Below normal.

What it means for US DTC: Stop reading your sale-week dashboard in isolation. Pull a four-week-before, sale-week, four-week-after view on every promotion you run. That's the number that tells you whether you actually grew or just borrowed revenue from next month at a margin penalty. If you're looking at the spike alone, you're celebrating a Tuesday and ignoring the empty pipeline on the 20th.

5. 90% of sitewide sale revenue comes from your hero products

During sitewide sales, Class A and B products (your best sellers and core range) account for 90.26% of revenue. Class D, the slow-moving stuff you said you wanted to clear, accounts for 0.2%.

Two-tenths of one percent.

What it means for US DTC: Sitewide sales don't clear dead stock. They discount your hero products to your best customers. If you've got slow inventory that's genuinely tying up cash, you don't need a sitewide sale, you need a targeted clearance channel. Outlet collection, a one-time email to a price-sensitive cohort, a marketplace push. Sitewide is the wrong tool. Frankly, if you're using sitewide sales to move dead stock, you're using a sledgehammer to crack a nut, and the sledgehammer is hitting your margin on the way down.

And one case study worth twenty minutes

The report includes a case study with Justin Hillberg, who took over Culture Kings ANZ in early 2025 and inherited a brand hooked on monthly promotional events. His playbook for tapering off is the closest thing I've seen to a working manual for a brand stuck in the loop.

The headline plays: diagnose what's actually driving the discount (often it's an inventory problem, not a marketing one), back your own product instead of third-party brands you have to compete on price with, and change the metrics on your dashboard before you change your promotional calendar. If your team is still tracking revenue and units as the headline numbers, they'll find ways to keep the discount engine running because that's what the numbers reward.

The full Culture Kings playbook sits at the back of the report. If you're a brand that's been hooked on monthly promos and you want to see what tapering off actually looks like in a real P&L, it's worth twenty minutes.

The one-line read

Discounting feels like marketing because it shows up in marketing channels, but the brands stuck in the loop almost always have a buying problem, a forecasting problem, or a segmentation problem the discount is papering over. The Hurman numbers tell you where that lands. 

If you only do one thing after reading this: add contribution profit per order to your main dashboard, and pull a four-week-after view on every promo from the last twelve months. That gives you the diagnostic you need to make every future discount a decision, not a default.