How to Plan Your Most Profitable Black Friday Yet

Before you plan this year's sale, do a quick post-mortem on last year's.

Pull up Shopify Analytics, set the date range to your sale window from last year, and compare it to a normal period from October (or any business as usual period):

• How much did you sell during the sale, compared to a normal week?
• What was your average order value during the sale? Higher, lower or the same as normal? (If people spent less per order, your discount ate the cart. If they spent more, something in your offer worked. Do it again!)
• Was it actually profitable? Work out roughly what you made after the discount, the ad spend and the extra shipping, if relevant. (It's SO easy to have a massive revenue week and make almost nothing profit-wise)
• What worked? Which offer, which product, which email, which ad? (That goes straight into this year's plan!)
• What didn't? What sold badly, what didn't convert, what cost more than it made? We won't repeat these mistakes.
• What do you want to do differently this year?
• How many of those customers ever came back?

With those answers in front of you, you can set a real target for this year. How much more do you want to sell? What does the average order need to be? And what would make it more profitable than last time: a shallower discount, a bigger cart, cheaper traffic, or a better follow-up after the sale? What are we doing again and what are we doing differently?

First Black Friday? No stress. You won't have most of this data, so you're going to guess, and that's completely fine. Use your best normal week as the baseline, pick a target you'd be happy with, and treat this year as the year you collect the real numbers.

Most people pick a discount the way they pick a Netflix show: something that sounds good and they think their customers will like. And yes, it'll most likely give you a lift. But we want your October to December offers to do three things: drive volume, drive average order value, and pay for themselves. PROFIT is king!

So, two questions before you touch a discount code:

1. What's your profit margin on the products you'll be pushing?
2. For whatever discount you select, roughly how many MORE orders (or how much bigger a cart) do you need to come out ahead of a normal week?

Here's the quick maths: Say a product sells for $100 and costs you $60 to land, so you make $40 on every sale. At 20% off, it sells for $80 and you make $20. So to make the same profit as a normal week, you need DOUBLE the orders.

This is why I bang on about AOV so much. Every extra $10 in the cart is one less order you need to find. Bundles, gift with purchase and free shipping thresholds all push the cart UP without pushing the price down (more on that in Step 3).

These are easy calculations (ask Claude or ChatGPT to do them if maths makes your head spin like mine!). But you HAVE to know them. Otherwise you get a huge revenue week, feel amazing, and not actually make healthy profit. 🙃

You've got three types of offers to play with, and they do very different jobs:

I usually recommend a mix of all three where you can. And that's roughly what the bigger brands are doing. Here's what DTC brands over $1M told the Beyond the Discount report they're running this holiday, next to what shoppers said actually sways them:

Free shipping is the offer shoppers picked MOST, and only 4 in 10 brands are running it. And brands are leaning on bundles way harder than shoppers are responding to them, which tells me bundles do their best work growing the cart (hello, Step 2 maths) and a weaker job of getting someone to click buy in the first place.

Before you lock anything in, check two things:

What's your margin on the products you're pushing? And are you spotlighting your heroes or clearing slow stock? Slow stock can take a deeper discount, because it's costing you money sitting in your warehouse or garage.

If your plan was to launch ON Black Friday, you're too late. Here's when brands are actually starting, per the Beyond the Discount report:

So 3 in 4 brands are live by mid November. Half of them (49.6%) keep something running from November right through December. And the few-day sale is basically extinct: only 9.9% of brands still do it.

Shoppers are just as spread out. Only 33.9% say Black Friday weekend is when they do their holiday shopping. Another 27.7% buy the second they see something they want, sale or no sale, and 18.7% shop later, closer to Christmas. So if you only show up for one weekend, you're missing two thirds of your buyers.

What I'd have you think about is a series of offers from mid November through to your Christmas shipping cutoff, rather than one code for one weekend.

You'll need to work out what makes sense for your brand, your stock and your capacity (a six week sale run by one person with a day job looks different to one with a 3PL and a team).

But longer works for most brands, on one condition: you keep it interesting and build momentum as you go. That's the next step.

For my Aussie founders: this is Click Frenzy, Black Friday, Christmas cutoffs and Boxing Day all in one run. Plan them together as one long campaign cut into multiple parts.

Here's what mid November to Christmas can look like when it's one clever campaign that keeps driving sales, instead of one code that's stale by week two:

1. Mid Nov
   What's live

   VIP early access for your list, then your main offer goes public

   Why it works

   Rewards the people who already love you and banks revenue before the inbox gets loud

2. Black Friday weekend
   What's live

   Add something on top: a gift with purchase, random order refunds, golden tickets in orders

   Why it works

   Gives people who saw the first offer a NEW reason to buy now

3. Early to mid Dec
   What's live

   A limited edition drop they can't get any other time

   Why it works

   Keeps momentum without cutting the price again, and it's a gift-shopper magnet

4. Mid Dec to cutoff
   What's live

   Free shipping right up to your Christmas post cutoff

   Why it works

   Catches the late shoppers and clears the last of the gifting demand

Setting up VIP early access for your list? Here's how to build your early access page →

The goal is to keep giving people new, exciting, actually-valuable reasons to buy. Every couple of weeks, something changes. That's what stops a six week sale going stale, and it's what turns the whole period into more than one Black Friday spike.

Swap the pieces for whatever fits your brand: a collab, a bonus product, a charity tie-in, an extended returns window for gifts. Random order refunds and golden tickets are also SO fun if your audience is into a bit of theatre. What matters is that something new lands every couple of weeks.

Nothing kills a sale faster than selling out of your hero on day one, or a customer waiting three weeks for a gift that needed to be under the tree. So before anything goes live, run through this:

If you're a team of one, be honest with yourself about what you can run. Two offers you can actually deliver on will make you more money (and cost you far less sleep) than five that completely burn you out.

Everything above brings new customers in. Now you need a plan for keeping them, because most brands hit a slump in January and just accept it as part of the season. You don't have to.

A discounted first purchase doesn't automatically turn into a loyal customer. In the Beyond the Discount report, 36.3% of shoppers said that after buying from a brand on a discount, they mostly come back when there's ANOTHER discount. Only 31.1% became regular full-price customers, and 28.6% said it depends on the brand. Which group your new customers land in gets decided in the first couple of weeks after their order, not on Black Friday.

And what brings them back has very little to do with the discount. Shoppers ranked product quality (77.8%), a good experience or service (63.6%) and rewards or points (46.8%) as the top reasons they buy from a brand again.

So before November launches, plan December, January and February with clear sales and marketing tactics to reconvert the customers you just paid to acquire. For example:

• A new product drop or a limited collection in January
• A flash shipping offer
• A new partnership or collaboration
• An amazing post-purchase email flow that nurtures them in the first two weeks: how to use it, what pairs with it, a reason to come back
• A loyalty or points nudge, if you run one

Hint: these aren't just more discounts, and they'll look different depending on your brand and industry. The goal is to compound your growth into the new year, so the biggest sale of the year becomes the start of your biggest year instead of a spike and a slump.