MarginBeacon – Promotion Margin Risk Checker

Discounts can increase sales while leaving too little revenue to cover product cost. MarginBeacon helps WooCommerce merchants evaluate gross product margin risk for a selected native coupon against current regular or active sale prices, then review risk on supported promotional orders.

Set up product costs, run a preflight for a selected native WooCommerce coupon, and review clear severity levels with reasons. MarginBeacon is watch-only: it reports risk without creating discounts, changing coupons, modifying checkout, or editing original order data.

Key Features in MarginBeacon Free

• Product cost setup and coverage: Use WooCommerce native Cost of Goods Sold (COGS) when available, or MarginBeacon Cost, with an optional global assumed-cost fallback. Coverage is sampled from supported catalog items, not a full-catalog guarantee.
• Selected-coupon preflight: Evaluate one native WooCommerce percentage, fixed-product, or fixed-cart coupon at a time against a bounded set of eligible products.
• Sale-price awareness: Use a product’s current regular or active sale price as the selected-coupon price basis. There is no standalone sale-price preflight. Supported sale-price evidence can also appear on promotional orders.
• Explainable risk classifications: Review severity, reason, affected product, cost source, and suggested remediation instead of a pass/fail result alone.
• Safe handling of incomplete evidence: Missing, stale, unsupported, or indeterminate data is reported as Unknown, never silently treated as Safe.
• Promotion-related order monitoring: See Promo Risk badges in WooCommerce Orders and open order-level risk details. Unpaid orders may first receive a preliminary result and be evaluated again after payment.
• Recent Orders Preview: Optionally evaluate up to 30 days or the latest 100 qualifying orders, whichever limit is reached first, to establish useful initial coverage.
• Global thresholds and basic health tools: Configure one store-wide threshold profile and review operational status and recovery guidance.

How It Works

1. Set up product costs. Open WooCommerce > MarginBeacon > Cost Setup, choose the active cost source, and review cost coverage.
2. Evaluate a supported promotion. Open Preflight, select one published native WooCommerce coupon, and run the evaluation.
3. Review risk. Read preflight findings, then use Findings / Order Risks and Promo Risk badges in WooCommerce Orders to review supported promotional orders.

Free and Pro

MarginBeacon Free provides the merchant baseline: cost setup and coverage, unlimited manual selected-coupon preflights, one global threshold profile, promotion-related order risk, bounded Recent Orders Preview, and basic health tools.

For fixed-cart coupons, Free evaluates deterministic single-line scenarios at quantity 1 for each eligible target. It does not build a representative multi-line basket.

The optional MarginBeacon Pro companion adds deeper operational coverage, including full, scheduled, and targeted scans; representative multi-line fixed-cart baskets; category-level controls; advanced evidence, filtering, exports, and diagnostics; baseline-order monitoring; advanced recalculation controls; and merchant-facing Price History. Free functionality remains available without Pro.

Safety and Scope

• MarginBeacon never changes storefront prices, coupons, cart totals, checkout behavior, or original order data.
• Checkout remains non-blocking. Version 1.0 is watch-only and does not enforce or block discounts.
• Coupon inventory covers native WooCommerce coupons. Third-party promotion engines are not claimed as complete or supported inventory.
• No promotion signal, unavailable Pro functionality, incomplete evidence, a processing failure, or stale data ever results in a Safe classification.
• MarginBeacon estimates gross product profit and gross product margin. It does not calculate net profit and is not financial or accounting advice.

Requirements

MarginBeacon requires:

• WordPress 6.4 or later
• PHP 7.4 or later
• WooCommerce 8.0 or later
• PHP BCMath extension

The PHP BCMath extension is required for exact money calculations. If BCMath is unavailable, MarginBeacon will remain inactive and display an administrator notice instead of running financial calculations with reduced precision.

Read the MarginBeacon documentation or ask a question in the WordPress.org support forum.