EP284: Leveraging Customer Data Over Discounting

This is the High Voltage Business Builders Podcast, daily intelligence for serious e-commerce portfolio builders across Amazon, TikTok Shop, Shopify, Walmart, and every channel that moves the needle. Neil Twa and his Voltage team, all day, every day since 2012. Let's get into it.

Discounting is a trap. I've watched sellers cut prices to move inventory and then cut again the next month, and the next. Pretty soon your margins are gone, and you've trained your customers to wait for the sale. There is a smarter play. Your transaction data is already telling you who your best customers are, what they buy, and when they come back. The question is whether you're listening to it. Here's the thing. Most sellers I talk to are sitting on a goldmine of customer behavior data And they're not using it. They see a slow week and they reach for the discount button. That's instinct, not strategy. And as one executive from Elevon put it, running on pure instinct only gets you so far. If you're doing $5,000 to $50,000 a month, your point-of-sale system or your Amazon Seller Central backend already tracks purchase frequency, what products customers buy together, and how often someone comes back. That data is a map. Most sellers just never open it. Here's what I tell the brands I work with: stop asking, how do I move more units, and start asking, who already buys from me and why? Those are 2 completely different questions. The first one leads you to discounts. The second one leads you to retention. 54% of US online adults say tailored offers are a key reason they join loyalty programs, according to Forrester.

Not discounts.

Tailored offers. There's a difference. A tailored offer says, I see you. A blanket discount says, I'm desperate. And McKinsey found that retailers using transaction data effectively see significantly higher repeat purchase rates and customer lifetime value. That's not a small operator problem, or a big operator problem. That's every operator's opportunity. I've run this on brands I manage directly. When we pull the data and identify the top 20% of customers by purchase frequency, we stop treating them like strangers. We treat them like VIPs. Early access to new SKUs, a restock alert before the listing goes live, a personalized email that says, this is back, and you're the first to know. That costs almost nothing to execute. And it builds the kind of loyalty that a 10% discount never will. The mechanism is simple: your data shows you who is already loyal. Your job is to recognize them before they go looking somewhere else. Let me give you two real pictures of how this plays out at different scales. First one, a seller I know in the home goods category doing around fifteen to twenty thousand dollars a month on Amazon. Slow Q1. She's feeling the pressure, and her first instinct is. to run a coupon. She's about to drop 15% across her whole catalog. I asked her to pull her repeat buyer data first. What we found was that roughly 30% of her revenue was coming from customers who had purchased 2 or more times in the last 6 months. That's a loyal base she didn't even know she had. Instead of a blanket coupon, she sent a targeted restock email to that segment when her best-selling SKU came back in after a supply gap. No discount, just early access and a personal note. Conversion on that email was strong, and she protected her margins completely. Second picture: a boutique retailer, not on Amazon, doing closer to $80,000 to $100,000 a month. They dug into their POS transaction data and found patterns in when their loyal customers shopped and what they bought together. They adjusted their inventory delivery schedule to match those patterns and ran targeted advertising to the right segment at the right time. Over 2 months, sales went up 15%. No discounting, just smarter timing and better targeting based on what the data already told them. 2 very different scales, same principle. The data already knew what the sellers didn't. As Juan Castro from Elevon said, data can help you pinpoint which customers are loyal, That's the starting point. Once you know who they are, you stop marketing to everyone and start talking to the people who already want to hear from you. This is what sellers who survive platform changes and economic pressure do differently. They stop guessing and start reading the room their customers already built for them.

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3 moves. You can start any of these this week, no matter what level you're at. First move: pull your repeat buyer data right now. On Amazon, go into your brand analytics and look at repeat purchase rate by ASIN. If you're on a standalone platform, Pull a 90-day transaction report and filter for customers with 2 or more orders. You're looking for your top 20% by frequency. That's your VIP list. A seller doing $5,000 a month might find 50 names. A seller doing $500,000 a month might find 5,000. The action is the same: identify them and treat them differently than everyone else. Second move. Replace your next planned discount with an early access offer. If you have a new product launching or a popular SKU coming back in stock, email that repeat buyer list first. No coupon code required, just you're the first to know. This works because, as Joe Flaherty from Elevon said, every customer needs to feel appreciated or recognized. Early access does that. A price cut doesn't. For a small seller, this is a simple email sequence. For a larger operator, it's a segmented campaign tied to inventory forecasting. Third move: look at what your loyal customers buy together. On Amazon, this shows up in the Frequently Bought Together data and in your own order history exports. If 40% of your repeat buyers always add a second product, that's a bundle waiting to happen. Bundle it. Price it at full margin. You've just increased average order value without touching your base price. These are not complicated moves. They're available to you right now. The data is already there. You just have to look at it. Look, economic pressure makes everyone want a discount. I get it. When revenue slows, cutting price feels like the fastest lever. But I've watched that lever destroy margins on brands that had real potential. The sellers who come out ahead are the ones who use the data they already have. To build loyalty instead of buying short-term volume. If you're sitting there thinking you don't have enough data yet, or you don't know where to start, that's exactly the conversation we have inside Voltage. We've been doing this for 13 years, not as coaches who read about e-commerce, as operators who run brands, make inventory calls, and manage the same pressures you're managing right now. Our approach is operator-led. Because that's the only way I know how to teach it. Whether you're at $3,000 a month trying to find your first loyal customer segment, or you're at $300,000 a month optimizing your retention stack, the framework is the same. Know who your best customers are. Recognize them. Give them a reason to come back that isn't a discount. If you want to find out where you actually stand and what your next move should be, Go to voltage dm dot com. We have a short assessment that gives you a real picture of your business, not a generic funnel quiz. It's built on the same operator framework we use with every brand we work with. You don't need to discount your way through a tough market. You need to know your customer better than your competitor does. Thanks for being here. I'm Neil Twa, and this is the High Voltage Business Builders Podcast. Build smart. That's a wrap on today's episode. If you're trying to figure out where AI actually fits in your business and where to invest before bolting it on top, head over to voltage dm.com/aiquiz. 5 questions, 60 seconds, a personalized AI readiness score, and an instant foundation gap report. Built for operators, not AI tourists. We'll be back tomorrow with another edge. Until then, stay high voltage.