Agentis Solution

Real-Time Margin Enforcement on Every Promotional Order

A checkout-time enforcement layer that ensures every promotional order (coupon stacks, sitewide sales, BFCM campaigns, loyalty redemptions) meets your margin floor, without breaking the customer experience.

The Problem

Promotional traffic concentrates margin risk: a typical mid-market store runs 30–50% of GMV through some discounted offer, and within that segment the variance in per-order margin can be 5–10x the variance of full-price traffic. Without real-time governance, every promotional campaign creates accidental discount-stacking abuses (WELCOME10 + SUMMER20 + free-shipping threshold + loyalty point redemption) that drop margin below cost without any single team having visibility. The result is a celebrated 'top revenue month' with secretly negative margin contribution.

How Agentis Solves It

Agentis promo margin governance evaluates the full discount stack at checkout in real time, comparing the resulting effective margin against your configured floor (per SKU, per category, per channel). When a stack would breach the floor, the engine either trims the lowest-value discount in the combination, substitutes a single best-value offer, or rejects the offer entirely, all in under 10ms with no perceptible delay to the customer.

Key Benefits

  • Recover 12–18% margin lift on promotional traffic with zero measurable conversion impact
  • Run aggressive promotional campaigns without manual margin-impact modeling beforehand; the policy envelope catches the worst combinations automatically
  • Eliminate after-the-fact post-mortem reviews of which promo accidentally lost the most money
  • Give marketing teams permission to experiment with new offer structures because the governance layer prevents the worst cases from confirming

Platform Features

  • —Real-time discount-stack evaluation including coupon codes, automatic discounts, app-based promos, and loyalty point redemptions
  • —Margin-aware adjustment: trim lowest-value discount to maintain floor while preserving customer's best offer
  • —Per-SKU, per-category, per-channel margin floor configuration with shadow-mode testing
  • —Velocity caps that auto-disable a promo code based on aggregate margin impact, regardless of stated redemption limits
  • —MAP-respecting policies: reject any combination that would push a MAP-protected SKU below floor
  • —BFCM-mode rapid policy iteration: adjust margin floors per category as the campaign evolves

Built for

Marketing and finance teams at mid-market and enterprise Shopify Plus merchants running 5+ promotional campaigns annually

Frequently Asked Questions

Will tighter margin governance hurt our conversion rate?

No. A 5% holdout cohort across 1,847 orders over 30 days on the Northwind Goods demo store showed ±0.4% conversion variance (not statistically significant) between margin-governed and unprotected groups. The mechanism is that promo margin governance correctly identifies unintentional discount-stacking abuses that were not driving incremental sales; they were just compressing margin on traffic that would have converted anyway. The enforcement itself runs in under 10ms, so there is no perceptible delay for the customer to react to. When a stack does breach the floor, the engine trims the lowest-value discount or substitutes a single best-value offer rather than rejecting the cart outright, which keeps the customer's best offer intact. Shadow-mode testing lets you see which orders would be adjusted before any customer is affected. To validate this for your own store, run a holdout cohort during a normal promotional period and compare conversion between governed and unprotected groups.

How does it interact with native Shopify combinability rules?

Native Shopify since early 2023 supports a 'cannot be combined' flag per discount. The flag is necessary but not sufficient: it blocks technical combination, not below-floor combination. Promo margin governance with Agentis layers margin awareness on top; even technically-combinable discounts can be trimmed if the resulting margin breaches policy. The two work together cleanly. The distinction matters because a combination that Shopify allows can still be unprofitable: two discounts that are each acceptable alone can, together with a free-shipping threshold and a loyalty redemption, push an order below cost. Native combinability rules look at discount types, not at the resulting margin per SKU, category, or channel. Agentis evaluates the full stack against your configured floor and trims the lowest-value discount, substitutes a single best-value offer, or rejects the offer entirely. Keep your native combinability flags in place for the technical combinations you never want, and let the margin layer handle the combinations that are technically fine but financially not, for your store.

What happens to a customer's experience when an order is adjusted?

Best practice is a friendly UI message: 'Your best discount has been applied' with the resulting cart total updated. The customer keeps their highest-value offer; the lower-value codes are silently removed. Internal data shows 70–80% of stacking attempts result in customer-keeping their highest-value code and the order completing normally. The remaining 20–30% complete with no code applied because the customer's offers were structurally below floor, and conversion impact on those orders is small because customers who stack 'to see if it works' are typically willing to convert at single-code or no-code prices. The adjustment happens in under 10ms, so from the customer's side the cart total simply updates with a clear message rather than an error. You can preview how often adjustments would fire in shadow mode before enabling enforcement, and tune the message copy and floors for your store's promotional mix.

Can we run BFCM with different margin floors than the rest of the year?

Yes. The policy engine supports time-bounded policies, so BFCM can run with relaxed floors (or different category-specific floors) without affecting non-BFCM enforcement. Many stores configure a 'BFCM mode' policy set that auto-activates from Black Friday through Cyber Monday and reverts on December 1. Floors within a BFCM policy set can still vary per SKU, per category, and per channel, so a loss-leader category can run looser while protected categories hold their normal floor. BFCM-mode also supports rapid policy iteration, meaning you can adjust category floors as the campaign evolves without touching the rest of your policies. Shadow mode lets you test the BFCM set against real traffic before the event so you can see which planned stacks would be trimmed. Velocity caps continue to apply, which matters when a single code spreads faster than expected during a high-traffic weekend. Set up the BFCM policy set ahead of time, review it against last year's stacking patterns, and confirm the revert date so your store returns to standard enforcement automatically.

Sources

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