How Customer Intelligence Helped Prevent $1.6m in Discounting Losses
Industry:
Grocery
Location:
Central, United States
$1.6m
Savings from over-discounting
$17m
Worth of affected transactions identified
The Insight
Ground beef is this retailer’s #1 selling item. But Goodlight AI revealed something critical: the hot-selling item was being discounted over 90% of the time. Most buyers would have purchased it at full price.
The discount wasn’t driving sales—it was draining margin.
The Cost of Over-Discounting
$17M in ground beef sales affected
Total of $6.2m in discounts in the last 12 months
$1.6M in lost margin—without moving the needle on volume, that's over $30K/week in unnecessary markdowns
The Deeper Problem
Promotions were being applied uniformly—without understanding which customer segments actually respond to discounts. And when it is easy to run discounts, operational managers are tempted to just keep those discounts running to drive topline revenue.
Traditional systems couldn’t answer:
Are we discounting to grow sales, or just giving away margin?
Which customer groups are price-sensitive?
Which items would sell at full price anyway?
What Goodlight AI Uncovered
By centralizing the revenue intelligence layer, Goodlight AI identified:
How much revenue leakage is due to discounts
Which discounts manage to drive sales (versus which don’t)
Which stores depend more on discounts to drive topline revenue
Through its customer intelligence layer, Goodlight AI analyzed purchase behavior by segment and found:
Discounting wasn’t needed to drive sales for high-frequency shoppers
The item would have sold at full price to core customer personas
Margin was being lost on unnecessary incentives
As a data-driven retailer, we pride ourselves on leveraging analytics to make smart decisions—but legacy systems can have blind spots. Goodlight AI surfaced a critical oversight in our pricing analytics within the first five weeks of onboarding. It saved us nearly $2 million in gross margin on a single item! Their AI platform, speed and efficiency is a game-changer.
Director of Operations, 25 store retailer in the Central U.S.
The Outcome
Discounts were reduced where not needed (down to a six week period per year)
Future decisions now grounded in customer-behavior-based insights
Pricing and promo strategies were redesigned to take feedback from shopper purchase behavior (not simply vendor promotions)
Why It Matters
Without customer intelligence, retailers over-discount—blindly.
Goodlight AI empowers retailers to target the right incentives to the right segments, protecting margin while still driving growth.
Because smart discounting starts with knowing your customer.
What Goodlight AI Delivers
Goodlight AI connects to transaction and loyalty data to:
Identify customer personas which reveal who shops in your store, buys what, for how much and when
Reduce vendor led promotions that are generic and lacks personalization
Drive store traffic without hurting margins through unnecessary discounting.
Identifies pricing breakdowns other systems miss
Helps retailers spot silent process failures before they cost millions
And in this case, it specifically shows how often items might be selling on unnecessary discounts.