Retail suppliers face mounting pressure. On one side, costs are shifting again due to tariff uncertainty and broader supply chain pressures. On the other side, retailers are still protecting price perception, watching shopper sensitivity, and pushing hard to defend their own margins.

A markdown rarely travels alone. That’s the part a lot of brands learn the hard way. They see a retailer markdown and think, “Okay, painful, but manageable.” What they don’t always see right away is the chain reaction behind it. Lower realized revenue.

There’s a particular kind of loss that doesn’t usually cause a big internal fire drill. It doesn’t show up like a missed sales forecast. It doesn’t explode like a failed promotion. It doesn’t get the same attention as a major compliance dispute. It just… leaks.

Promotions are supposed to do something good. Drive volume. Win visibility. Support a launch. Create excitement. Move shoppers from “maybe later” to “I’ll grab it now.” That’s the theory.

Markdowns happen. Every retailer has them. Every supplier funds them at some point. The problem isn’t markdown funding. The problem is markdown drift—when price protection and markdown deductions creep beyond what was approved. Wider store lists. Longer windows. Wrong base costs. Caps ignored.

Tariffs don’t just tweak your landed cost. They scramble forecasts, force pricing decisions you can’t take back, and turn “we’ll sort it out later” into real margin pain—fast. In this KUAF Ozarks at Large interview, HRG President Boyd Evert breaks down what the latest tariff ruling means on the ground for retail suppliers.

Promotional allowances are supposed to be the controlled part of the retailer relationship. You plan the event.You fund the discount. You track the lift. And then… two months later… deductions show up that don’t match anything anyone remembers approving. That’s the moment trade spend stops feeling like growth investment and starts feeling like a slow leak.

Markdowns feel simple in the store: price goes down, product sells through. But financially? Markdowns can turn into a messy conversation about who funds the margin gap—and whether the claim you received matches what you actually agreed to.

McKinsey reports that consumer packaged goods (CPG) companies invest about 20% of revenue in trade promotions, and that a large share of promotions fail to generate profit (their article cites research indicating 59% lost money globally and 72% in the United States). So when a promotional allowance is misapplied, duplicated, or “missing documentation” later appears as a deduction… it’s not a rounding error. It’s your margin getting billed twice.

If you’ve ever seen an “excessive defectives” fee and thought, Wait… since when are we paying a subscription for returns? — You’re not alone.

Retail compliance used to feel like a binder on a shelf. Now it’s more like a moving target—with three versions. A routing guide gets updated. A portal rule changes. Someone forwards an email amendment. Your third-party logistics provider (3PL) has a checklist that’s nearly identical. Meanwhile, your warehouse is just trying to ship clean, on time, every day.

One deduction is painful. Two for the same issue? That’s a margin leak with a trench coat on. Duplicate deductions usually aren’t malicious. They’re procedural. Multiple systems, multiple teams, and multiple “reasons” can get attached to the same underlying event—especially when disputes are rushed, and documentation is scattered.

“Excessive defectives” fees have a way of showing up like a tax. Not because your product suddenly got worse overnight—but because returns, handling, and attribution get messy after peak season. And February is when the mess hardens into numbers that hit your remittance.

February can feel… quieter. No holiday promo chaos. No year-end close panic. Just a brief window where you can finally look up. And that’s exactly when a lot of suppliers discover the problem: deductions have been stacking up in the background, hiding in offsets, short pays, and messy remittance detail. One industry paper from the Return Value Chain Federation (RVCF) put it bluntly: depending on the industry, customer deductions can reach 5%–15% of revenue, and even “typical”

Tariffs don’t just change costs. They change deductions. Because the moment your costs move, you’re in a race between reality and the retailer’s system.

Last year, you could win a dispute with a decent note and a screenshot. This year, that same package gets denied because it’s missing the lot code, the timestamp, the condition photo, and the proof of delivery. It feels personal. It’s not.

There are deductions you disagree with. And then there are deductions you shouldn’t even be looking at—because you already dealt with them.

January is when retailers try to get their house back in order. They’ve got seasonal inventory to clear, new sets to build, and demand that usually cools off after December. One study found retail spending drops an average 22.4% between December and January.

Q1 is the quarter where everyone asks the same question: “Did we actually make money on that holiday volume?” Because the truth usually arrives late—through promotional billbacks, pricing deductions, and post-audit debits that land weeks (or months) after the product shipped. NRF’s Retail Monitor data showed 2025 holiday sales (Nov. 1–Dec. 31) grew 4.1% . That’s a lot of invoices, a lot of promotions, and a lot of opportunities for the math to drift. And drift is exactly how

1) Split-shipment confusion Holiday fulfillment is messy. Partial shipments are common. The dispute comes when the customer (or retailer’s system) treats “partial” as “missing.” What to save:  shipment IDs, carton tracking, carrier scans by package, and timestamps showing each leg of fulfillment. 2) “Porch claims” and delivery disputes Package says “delivered.” Customer says “never received.” Retailers increasingly push for faster resolutions to protect customer experience—th