On Black Friday and Cyber Monday brands reap what they sow. The brands that meet and exceed their goals start preparing long before November. They’ve already audited their site, cleaned up their data, and planned out their promotions and logistics months and weeks in advance.
Here’s what we recommend focusing on before this year’s peak season, organized by area.
Technical Foundation
Performance & Tech Readiness
Site speed and site stability are critical during BFCM.
- Audit and disable apps you’re not actively using. Every installed app adds scripts and weight to your storefront, and trimming unused ones will support performance.
- Prioritize Core Web Vitals. They directly impact your conversion rate and your Google ranking, and getting ahead of performance improvements now gives you more flexibility before peak season.
Analytics & Tracking Hygiene
When your data is clean you can act on it with confidence. Good data makes every decision easier.
- Check that your pixel and conversion events are firing correctly.
- Audit important tracking before Black Friday. It can save you from finding gaps after the fact.
Site Themes & Plans
When a customer lands on your site, it’s often their first impression of the brand.
- A mobile-first approach is a strong foundation and highly recommended. More than half of traffic comes from mobile.
- If you have a staging site, test in staging. Also regardless, make sure you have a rollback plan. It gives your team confidence going into the event and gives you a way to quickly reverse in case anything goes wrong.
- Refresh customer account functionality. Save for later, wish lists, and branding details all contribute to a better experience for your customers.
Commercial Strategy
Promo Strategy
The best BFCM promos tend to be easy to understand and demonstrate the genuine value customers are saving.
- Keep promo offers clear and straightforward. Clear deals convert better. If your offer needs explaining, it’s worth simplifying so customers can understand easier.
- Tag your campaigns for clean reporting. It gives you much better insights when you are hindsighting and planning for next year.
- Deals that feel like a genuine discount or a rare opportunity perform well, and loyalty early access is a great way to reward your best customers.
- Use countdown timers thoughtfully. Used well, they’re an effective conversion tool.
- Don’t overlook Cyber Week. Plan your cadence through Monday and make sure you are rewarding customers that arrive over the weekend.
Inventory & Merchandising
Planning your inventory before your promotions helps avoid inventory gaps during and after the event.
- Forecast safety stock early. This is especially important for retail.
- Merchandise dynamically throughout the event. Surfacing high-intent products with strong inventory can make a meaningful difference in results and can help convert customers who may have bounced.
- Plan out a post-BFCM reactivation strategy before the BFCM event starts, so it’s ready to go the moment BFCM wraps.
Gifting
Simplified, holiday shopping is gifting. Brands that make it easy to give, bundle, and personalize tend to win the season.
- Make sure gift cards are prominent. They’re consistently a top gifting item and you want them to be surfaced across the website making it easy for customers to find.
- Add shareable wish lists. They’re a low-effort way to let your customers do some of the converting for you. Most wishlist tools have this feature.
- Offer gift wrapping, bundles, and add-ons at checkout. The holiday timeframe is a natural moment for it.
Acquisition & Discovery
Discovery, Ads & Marketing
BFCM tends to reward brands that show up consistently across channels with proven creative and clear segmentation.
- Lean into what’s historically worked for your brand. That’s usually a safer bet during peak than trying something new.
- Segment your campaigns by new versus returning audiences. Separating returning high-intent visitors from new acquisition users can improve relevance and efficiency.
- Build your lists before the event, for email and SMS, and offer VIP early access. Post-purchase sequences for new BFCM customers are worth investing in too. Retaining customers is as valuable as acquiring them for re-conversion.
Onsite Search
Customers who search are your highest-intent visitors. Making sure your search experience is ready for them is a high-value investment.
- Tune for holiday language. Think “deals,” “BFCM,” “Black Friday,” “gifts,” and “promos,” along with your top products and searches.
- Audit for zero-result searches before peak. It’s an easy way to close gaps that might otherwise go unnoticed.
AI Visibility & Agentic Commerce Readiness
More customers are starting their shopping journeys inside AI tools. Brands with structured, citable, and clear content tend to show up in those results.
- Think through how an AI agent would surface your products and promotions on a customer’s behalf. Is your content set up to support this?
- Invest in GEO/AEO. Optimizing for it through structured content and clear brand signals is increasingly worth the effort.
- CQL’s AI Commerce Services can evaluate where your product data and discoverability stand today and help optimize how your products are surfaced in AI platforms.
Conversion & Risk
Payments, Shipping & Logistics
Reducing friction at checkout and giving customers clarity around delivery are two of the highest-impact items you can prepare for before BFCM.
- Get Buy Now Pay Later live ahead of the event if it’s on your roadmap.
- Publish a shipping cutoff calendar. It helps customers plan and tends to reduce last-minute support volume.
- Offer a visible and generous return window. This can help uncertain shoppers convert.
Fraud
Higher traffic naturally brings more fraud exposure. Fraudsters lean on these busy timeframes to strike.
- Brief your CS team on holiday fraud patterns before Black Friday, not during it.
- Align finance and operations teams on thresholds and response plans ahead of time.
- Confirm whether you’re relying on Shopify Fraud Protect or a third-party vendor, and make sure it’s properly configured before peak.
Post-BFCM & Cyber Week
The full Cyber Week window is an opportunity most brands don’t fully take advantage of.
- Map out a Cyber Week cadence in advance.
- Don’t skip the weekend between Black Friday and Cyber Monday. It’s an easy time to overlook so keep offers live.
- Build a reactivation strategy for the new customers you just acquired, while they’re still warm.
The Takeaway
You don’t need to reinvent your approach to successfully prepare for BFCM. Success requires getting the fundamentals right early: a fast, stable site, clean data, simple promotions, and a plan for fraud and fulfillment before traffic spikes. Start working on these tactics now, and reap the rewards.
