Promo Calendar
by
Promotional timing for ecommerce teams: test each planned promo against stock, margin and the calendar around it, then pull it forward, delay it, or cancel it.
A promo calendar gets built in one sitting months ahead and then runs unchanged through a quarter that did not go as planned. The August sale was sized for inventory that arrived late, the September offer sits two weeks before a competitor's known event, and the November promo discounts a product that has been selling at full price all autumn. Nobody revisits the plan because revisiting it means reopening a decision everyone already agreed to. This skill tests each planned promo against current stock, current margin and the calendar around it, then pulls it forward, delays it, or cancels it.
What It Does
- Checks each planned promo against the stock that will actually be on hand.
- Prices the margin the promo gives up at the discount currently planned.
- Estimates how much of the volume would have converted at full price anyway.
- Reads the spacing between promos for the fatigue it creates.
- Identifies the promo whose timing collides with a known external event.
- Pulls forward, delays, or cancels each planned promo with the reason.
Use Cases
- Cancel a promo on a product that has been selling out at full price.
- Move a sale off the week where inventory will not have landed.
- Space two promos far enough apart that the second one still works.
- See the margin a quarter of planned promos gives up before the quarter starts.
Example Session
Review next quarter's promo calendar against where we actually are.
Two of the four promos should move. One should not run at all.
- Promo | Planned | Discount | Margin given up | Action
- Late summer clearance | Aug 8 | 30% | $41,200 | Delay to Aug 22
- Back to season | Sep 5 | 20% | $28,600 | Run as planned
- Jacket preview | Oct 3 | 15% | $19,400 | Cancel
- Black Friday early access | Nov 21 | 25% | $86,000 | Pull forward to Nov 18
Clearance moves because the replacement stock lands on August 19 and discounting into an empty warehouse sells nothing twice. The jacket preview cancels: that line has sold at full price for six weeks and the discount would buy volume you already have. Early access moves three days earlier because your two largest competitors both opened on the 19th last year.
Why This Beats Prompting It Yourself
A Fixed Calendar vs Current Stock And Margin: The Hidden Risk
A generic prompt reviews the calendar as a document and comments on its balance and spacing. It cannot see that the August stock lands on the 19th or that the jacket has been selling at full price since September, so it approves a plan that was correct when written and is now expensive. A promo calendar is a set of decisions with expiry dates, not a schedule.
When You Still Need The Volume That Was Coming Anyway
The real cost of a promo is not the discount, it is the discount given to people who were going to buy regardless. This skill separates incremental volume from the volume already in motion, which is why the jacket preview cancels: 15% off a line selling at full price is $19,400 handed to customers mid-purchase. Promo plans rarely carry that number, which is why they rarely get canceled.
Known Limitations
Incremental volume is estimated from your own history of similar promos, so a first promo on a new category returns a wide range and the output labels it. External event timing comes from what you record about competitors, and the skill will not know about an event you have not told it about. It revises the calendar and does not create or schedule the promotions themselves.
Install It
- Download the ZIP.
It is free and there is no account to create. - Unzip it into your agent's skills folder.
Claude Code reads ~/.claude/skills/, which is hidden by default: the command in the folder block opens it. Other agents scan their own directory, so drop the same folder there instead. - Ask your agent to use it.
Restart the agent if it was already running, then it picks the skill up with no config.
skills folder
Copy
~/.claude/skills/promo-calendar/
SKILL.md
references/promo-history.md
calendar/
# one file per review, with the revised plan
# macOS: create the folder and open it in Finder
mkdir -p ~/.claude/skills && open ~/.claude/skills
# Windows: paste in the Explorer address bar
%USERPROFILE%\.claude\skills\Frequently asked questions
How is this different from reviewing the calendar in a meeting?
A meeting reviews the plan against opinion and the original rationale. This reviews it against the inventory that will be on hand, the margin currently in the products, and what comparable promos actually produced. The output is three moves and a cancellation rather than a discussion.
Which agents does the skill run in?
Any agent that supports the open SKILL.md format: Claude Code, Cursor, Codex CLI, GitHub Copilot, Gemini CLI, Manus, Grok and others load it unmodified. The format is portable, the location is not. Each agent scans its own skills directory, so you drop the same folder into whichever one yours uses. There is no config file to edit and no API key to provision.
What does it need connected to work?
The planned promo calendar, inventory and inbound purchase orders, product margin, and history of previous promos with their results. Without promo history it still checks stock and margin and says the incremental estimate is unavailable.
Why cancel a promo rather than reduce the discount?
Because a product selling out at full price has no discount that improves the outcome. Reducing 15% to 8% still hands margin to customers already buying. The skill recommends a smaller discount where demand genuinely responds, and cancellation where it does not.
Does it consider the effect on the promos after it?
Yes. Promo spacing is read as a sequence, because a sale three weeks before a bigger one trains customers to wait and takes volume from both. That is why the recommendation moves dates rather than only approving or rejecting them.
What is included with the skill?
The skill itself, the promo history reference, the calendar revision format, and the incrementality model. It is free and security scanned. We re-publish the ZIP when the model changes, so download it again if your estimates start shifting.
Moving a promo moves the cash it was meant to bring in.
Polar ties promo performance to margin and cash timing in one semantic layer, so pulling forward or canceling is weighed against the quarter.
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