My Supplier Offers 10% Off if I Buy Five Fragrance Oils Together — How Do I Calculate Whether the Discount Justifies Buying Slower-Moving Scents in Bulk?

What the 10% is worth, and what it is not

Start with the size of the prize, because it is smaller than the percentage feels. On a five-oil basket priced at 1 kg each from live CSI stock, the basket comes to ₹33,289.60 and your supplier's 10% is ₹3,328.96. That is a real number and worth having. But it is earned on the whole basket, including the oils you were buying anyway, and the decision in front of you is not about the whole basket. It is about the part you would not otherwise have bought.

Split the basket in two and the question sharpens immediately. Three of these scents move — say Orchard Pear at ₹3,738.00, Apple Cinnamon at ₹4,743.60 and Ylang Ylang Flower at ₹5,310.00, ₹13,791.60 of oil you would have ordered with or without a discount. Two of them are the slow ones the offer is pushing you towards: Juicy Orange at ₹7,499.00 and Tangerine at ₹11,999.00, ₹19,498.00. The 10% you collect on the part you were buying anyway is ₹1,379.16. The cash you hand over for the part you were not is ₹17,548.20 after the same discount.

Written that way the offer looks different. You are not being given ₹3,328.96. You are being given ₹1,379.16 on your normal order, on condition that you also spend ₹17,548.20 on stock you have no orders for. Whether that is a good trade depends entirely on one thing — how much of that ₹19,498.00 of oil you will genuinely use before you stop selling those scents — and the rest of this page is the arithmetic that answers it.

The one equation that answers it

Set the two futures side by side. In the first you take the offer: you pay 90% of the whole basket, committed oils and added oils together. In the second you refuse it: you pay full price for the committed oils now, and full price later for however much of the added scents you eventually get round to using. Everything else — your jars, your wax, your time — is identical in both, so it cancels and can be ignored.

Call the committed spend C, the added spend A, the discount d, and the fraction of the added oil you will genuinely use u. Taking the offer costs (1 − d) × (C + A). Refusing it costs C + uA. The offer wins when (1 − d)(C + A) is less than C + uA, and rearranging that gives the whole answer in one line: u > (1 − d) − dC ÷ A. At a 10% discount that is u > 0.9 − 0.1C ÷ A.

Put your numbers in. C is ₹13,791.60, A is ₹19,498.00, d is 10%. 0.1 × C is ₹1,379.16; divide that by A and you get 0.0707; subtract it from 0.9 and the answer is 82.9%. You must eventually use 82.9% of those two kilograms of slow-moving oil — 1,659 g, or about 104 candles at 16 g each — before the 10% basket discount leaves you better off than simply buying what you needed. Below that line the discount is a loss dressed as a saving.

The bottom two rows are where this page earns its keep. Add the same two scents in 100 g packs instead of kilograms and the added spend collapses to ₹1,948.00 — at which point you only need to use 19.2% of them, about 2 candles between the two, for the discount to be worth taking. Your supplier's condition was five oils, not five kilograms. Nothing in the offer says the fifth oil has to be a big one.

And the last row generalises it. Whatever your committed spend is, the added spend at which the discount is worth taking even if the oil is never used at all is d × C ÷ (1 − d) — here ₹1,532.40. Anything you add below that figure is free money, because the discount on the order you were placing anyway more than covers it. Anything above it is a bet on your own sales, and the equation tells you exactly how big a bet.

Running your own five-oil basket

What CSI publishes: three order-value codes, and no ladder

CSI publishes three spend-based discount codes: HAPPY5 at 5% over ₹5,000, BIZWIZ8 at 8% over ₹12,000 and YAY10 at 10% over ₹20,000. They are order-value discounts. They depend on what the whole basket comes to in rupees — nothing else. They do not depend on how many different scents are in it, how large a pack you choose, or whether you buy oil at all.

That distinction is not a technicality, it is the answer to your question. A count-based offer of the kind in your title forces variety on you: five different oils, or no discount. A value-based code does not. You can reach ₹20,000 with three scents you already sell, a wax you already pour and a box of wicks you will certainly use. On the prices above, Orchard Pear, Apple Cinnamon and Ylang Ylang Flower at 1 kg each come to ₹13,791.60; add two 10 kg packs of Luxury Soy Wax CSI 464 at ₹5,074.00 each and a 500 pack of Eco Candle Wicks Thin (C1) at ₹2,950.00 and the basket is ₹26,889.60, comfortably past the YAY10 threshold, worth ₹2,688.96, with not one rupee of it committed to a scent you have not sold.

The second thing to say plainly is what CSI does not publish. There is no per-kilogram quantity break on this store, and this page is not going to pretend otherwise. Run the rate ladder on the five oils in the basket and you get the truth of it: Orchard Pear runs from ₹7.00 a gram in its smallest pack down to ₹3.74 a gram at 1000 gm; Apple Cinnamon is ₹4.74 a gram from 50 gm all the way to 1 kg; Tangerine is ₹11.98 a gram at 50g and ₹12.00 a gram at 1kg, which is marginally dearer in the larger pack. Check the ladder on the oil you are actually buying rather than assuming the kilogram is the cheap way to buy it.

One review on the store puts the underlying wish plainly — a customer hoping for a discount on bulk buys. It is a fair thing to want and worth answering honestly rather than with a sales line: the published codes are the discount, they work on order value, and for a large consignment the route is a quote on WhatsApp rather than a ladder on the product page. Nothing on this page assumes a rate that is not printed.

The freight line the discount hides

There is a second saving in buying the basket together, and unlike the discount it is arithmetically certain. CSI's delivery charges are published flat rates by weight band, and a parcel's band is set by the stored packed weight, not the label on the bottle. The five 1 kg oils in this basket store packed weights of 1.5 kg, 1.5 kg, 2.0 kg, 1.1 kg and 1.1 kg — 7.2 kg together. Ordered one at a time, each of those parcels falls in a band costing ₹180.00 on Standard Shipping, so five separate orders is ₹900.00. Sent as one 7.2 kg consignment the cheapest published band is ₹800.00, also on Standard. The difference is ₹100.00, as published in September 2026.

That is a smaller number than the discount and it is worth keeping it in proportion. ₹100.00 across a basket of ₹33,289.60 is not the reason to buy five oils at once. But it is the reason not to trickle an order out over five weeks, and it is real in a way the discount is not until the oil is actually poured. Two reviews on the store say plainly that delivery charges feel high; consolidating is the honest answer to that, and it is the one lever on this page that costs you nothing to pull.

Carry that into the candle if you want it in the same units as everything else. Five kilograms of fragrance at 16 g a candle scents 312 candles, so the ₹100.00 difference between five parcels and one is a fraction of a rupee each. The discount, at ₹3,328.96, is about ₹10.65 a candle across the same run — provided every gram gets poured. That proviso is the entire subject of this page.

Why slow scents are expensive even when they are discounted

There is a way of looking at unused oil that makes the whole argument obvious, and it is worth putting in your own sheet permanently. Take what you paid for a scent, and divide it by the grams of it you actually poured — not the grams you bought. Buy a kilogram of Tangerine at ₹11,999.00 with the 10% applied, pour half of it, and you did not pay ₹12.00 a gram; you paid ₹21.60 a gram, because the other 500 g bought you nothing. Pour a quarter of it and you paid ₹43.20 a gram.

Notice how quickly the advantage goes. Pour every gram and the discount genuinely saves you ₹1.20 a gram. Pour three quarters of it and you are already ₹2.40 a gram worse off than if you had bought only what you needed at the list rate. There is no gentle slope here: the effective rate is a hyperbola, and it goes vertical the moment a scent stops selling.

That is also the answer to the follow-up question makers usually ask, which is whether to take the discount and blend the leftovers away. Blending is a real option and it recovers some value — but it recovers it at the rate of the scent you blend into, not the rate you paid. A kilogram of a ₹11,999.00-a-kilogram oil blended down into a house scent built on a ₹3,738.00-a-kilogram base is not a saving, it is a considered write-down. Do it with your eyes open, at a defined percentage, and burn-test the result, because a blend is a new formulation and behaves like one.

One more check before you commit a kilogram

There is a formulation question hiding inside a purchasing one, and it is worth two minutes before a kilogram goes in the basket. Fragrance load on this series is a percentage of wax weight, which is how CSI product pages state it, and two published figures govern it: the wax grade's stated maximum and the oil page's stated candle range. Where they differ, the lower one governs. Luxury Soy Wax CSI 464 states a maximum of 10% of total wax weight. On the oils in this basket, the Apple Cinnamon page states soy use of 6–10% of total wax weight and the Ylang Ylang Flower page states up to 10% for soy wax, so 8% sits inside both and the 16 g a candle used throughout this page is available to you.

Two of the five publish no candle usage range at all — Orchard Pear and Tangerine. That is normal and it is not a defect; many oil pages publish a rate and a size and nothing else. What it means practically is that for those two the wax grade's stated maximum is the only published limit you have, and the sensible course is to start low, test burn, and ask on WhatsApp for the usage range before you commit to a large pack. Buying a kilogram of an oil whose working range you have not yet established is a bigger risk than the discount is a reward.

Cure time belongs in the same paragraph, because it changes how long your cash is committed. Some oil pages give a 24 to 48 hour cure. Treat that as the earliest a candle can be test-burned; soy throw keeps developing, and the Luxury Soy Wax CSI 464 family of container soys is best judged at 14 to 21 days, which the Luxury Soy Wax Chunks page itself frames as ideally one to two weeks. So a kilogram of a new scent bought today is not five hundred candles of sellable stock today. It is a test pour now, a verdict in three weeks, and — if the verdict is good — a scent you can then buy properly. That sequence is cheaper than any discount.

What this page will not put a number on

Every figure on this page is either your own stated 10% or a live CSI price in September 2026. There is a second half to a stock decision that no supplier can price for you, and inventing a figure for it would make this page feel more complete and be worth less. Copy the rows below into your own sheet and fill them in from your own records.

One of those blanks deserves a sentence, because it is the one that decides most of these arguments in practice. The cost of cash is not an abstraction for a small candle business in a festive year. ₹17,548.20 tied up in two scents in September is ₹17,548.20 not available for jars, wax or a stall booking in October, and Diwali 2026 falls on 8 November 2026, which means festive candles want pouring by about mid-October for a 14 to 21 day cure plus delivery. A discount that is collected in March and paid for in October is not the same discount.

Frequently asked questions