Discounting to chase volume usually moves you further from break-even

The reasoning sounds solid. Sales are soft, so drop the price a bit, sell more units, end up level or ahead.

It rarely works, and the reason is arithmetic rather than marketing.

What a price cut actually cuts

You do not lose ten percent of the price. You lose ten percent of the price out of the part you were keeping.

Say you sell at fourteen and it costs you six twenty to make. Contribution is seven eighty. Cut the price to twelve sixty and contribution falls to six forty. The price went down nine percent. The part that pays your rent went down eighteen.

To stand still you now need about twenty two percent more units. Not nine.

It gets worse as margins get thinner

The thinner your contribution, the more brutal this is. On a product where contribution is thirty percent of price, a ten percent discount needs roughly fifty percent more volume to break level. Most businesses cannot produce fifty percent more of anything without adding cost, which moves the target again.

This is why discounting works for supermarkets and destroys small manufacturers. Volume is nearly free for one and expensive for the other.

When it does make sense

When the extra volume genuinely costs you nothing. Digital products, empty seats, a service hour that was going to be idle anyway. There the whole discounted price is contribution and the maths is different.

Also when you are buying something other than revenue: a first order from a customer you expect to keep, or clearing stock that is costing you space. Those are defensible. Just be honest that you are paying for something, rather than telling yourself it will pay for itself in volume.

The check worth doing first

Before any discount, work out the break even volume at the new price and compare it to your best month ever. If the number you need is above anything you have achieved, the discount is not a plan.

That takes about two minutes and I have watched it stop several bad decisions.

The version of this that does work is a smaller price rise. Nobody wants to hear it, and the arithmetic is the mirror image: on thin contribution, a five percent increase buys a lot of room to lose a few customers and still be ahead. Most businesses have never tested where their actual ceiling is, because testing it feels riskier than discounting, which is exactly backwards.