The BFCM 2026 guide for Shopify brands

Your BFCM 2026 game plan

Black Friday is November 27, and Cyber Monday is November 30. This guide covers the decisions that matter most: which offers are worth running, where to improve the shopping experience, and how to tell whether the weekend actually paid off.

Short on time? Start with these five priorities

1. Choose one clear offer and check that its terms match across ads, landing pages, product pages, and the cart.
2. Check the margins on any discounts, bundles, gifts, or free shipping incentives.
3. Feature a few proven product combinations rather than building an entirely new promotion at the last minute.
4. Test the full mobile journey, from a campaign link to order confirmation.
5. Confirm inventory, shipping deadlines, return policies, and tracking. Avoid untested theme changes.

Choose the strategies that fit your store

If time is tight, get the essentials working before adding anything new.

Who shops during BFCM

Many of the shoppers who arrive during BFCM have never bought from you. In Bluecore’s analysis of Black Friday 2024, 64% of online shoppers were new to the retailer they bought from.

These new customers behave differently. A Tresl study of 106 high-growth Shopify stores compared customers acquired during BFCM 2024 with customers acquired at other times:

BFCM shoppers spend more on their first order but are less likely to come back. That makes the weekend more of an acquisition moment than a loyalty moment, with three implications:

1. Build for a first-time visitor. Review your homepage, product pages, cart, and checkout as someone who has never heard of you. They should be able to see who you are, why to trust you, what the deal is, and whether their order will arrive in time.
2. Make the most of the first order. These shoppers arrive ready to spend, and this order may be the largest you get from them. Bundles, spending thresholds, and relevant add-ons matter most here.
3. Plan the follow-up before the traffic arrives. Tag BFCM customers so they get their own follow-up instead of your regular newsletter. The follow-up section later in this guide covers what to send and when.

These are averages across many stores. Check your own numbers from last year: the share of BFCM orders from new customers, and how many of those customers bought again.

How AI is changing BFCM shopping behavior

Shoppers can now use AI assistants to compare products, narrow their choices, and research purchases before visiting a store. Some will arrive directly on a product or collection page instead of starting at your homepage.

That makes accurate product information and useful landing pages especially important.

• Check descriptions, specifications, prices, availability, and shipping details across your store and product feeds.
• Make sure shoppers can understand the offer and answer common questions wherever they land.
• Once they're on your site, help them find suitable products through clear collections, useful search results, and relevant recommendations.

The way shoppers discover your products may change, but they still need a clear reason to buy.

What we learned from BFCM 2025

Here’s what Rebuy reported across brands using its platform from Black Friday through Cyber Monday in 2025.

A note on the data: GMV reflects merchants’ total sales, not revenue generated by Rebuy. Attributed revenue follows Rebuy’s reporting methodology and doesn’t establish incremental lift. Don’t add feature-level figures together unless their definitions and overlap have been verified. Read the BFCM 2025 recap.

Five lessons for BFCM 2026

1. Look beyond product pages. The shopping journey offers more than one chance to suggest a useful addition. Choose a few placements worth testing instead of putting recommendations everywhere.
2. Prepare for the busiest day. Black Friday accounted for $17.9 million of the $54.1 million in reported Rebuy-attributed revenue. Across Shopify, sales peaked at $5.1 million per minute at 12:01 p.m. ET on Black Friday. Check offer rules, inventory, and checkout eligibility ahead of time so you can focus on keeping things running when traffic arrives.
3. Make recommendations useful. A shopper buying running shoes might appreciate performance socks; someone buying a gift might want a ready-made set. Let the product and the shopper’s intent guide the offer.
4. Don’t stop at payment. Post-purchase offers and subscriptions contributed to the activity Rebuy reported. Evaluate each on its own terms, including profit and customer response.
5. Design for the phone first. During Cyber Week 2025, phones drove 78% of global online traffic but only 70% of orders, according to Salesforce. Speed is part of that gap. A Deloitte study commissioned by Google found that a 0.1-second improvement in mobile load time raised retail conversions by 8.4%. Remove apps and scripts you no longer use, compress images, and test your cart, bundles, and offers on a real phone.

Your BFCM preparation timeline

90 days out: Plan the economics

• Review last year's results.
• Set targets for sales and contribution profit.
• Forecast inventory.
• Decide which products can support discounts or bundles.
• Check fulfillment capacity and return policies before committing to an offer.

60 days out: Build and test

• Create landing pages and collections.
• Set up bundles, cart recommendations, shipping thresholds, and any eligible checkout or post-purchase offers.
• Test early enough to learn what works and fix what doesn't.

30 days out: Get ready to launch

• Confirm creative, email and SMS schedules, inventory, analytics, and support materials.
• Test the journey from product page to payment on a phone.
• Check that promotions start and end when they're supposed to.
• Grow your email and SMS lists with a BFCM-specific signup offer, such as early access to the sale. About three quarters of shoppers start planning before mid-November, and more than half prefer email for BFCM promotions.
• Work back from carrier shipping cutoffs to set your order-by dates, then plan your send calendar around them.

The week before: Build anticipation

• Tell subscribers when the sale starts and ends.
• Open early access to subscribers a few days before the public launch. It rewards your list and gives you a live test before peak traffic.

Black Friday week: Keep things running

• Avoid major untested changes.
• Watch inventory, campaign links, pricing, payment, site performance, and tracking.
• Monitor conversion, revenue per session, and contribution profit without reacting to every small fluctuation.

The weekend: Give each day its own job

• Thursday (U.S. Thanksgiving): Make sure the sale is live and easy to find. One message is enough.
• Black Friday: Lead with your strongest offer and best sellers.
• Saturday: Keep the offer, but change the angle, such as featuring a different collection.
• Sunday: Focus on shipping deadlines so gifts arrive in time.
• Cyber Monday: Use final-hours messaging, and end the sale when you say you will.

The week after: Follow through

• Send shipping updates before customers start asking.
• Tag BFCM customers so their follow-up is separate from your regular newsletter.

Final launch checklist

• Offers and exclusions match across ads, pages, cart, and checkout.
• Recommendations respect current inventory.
• Shipping costs, deadlines, and return policies are easy to find.
• Mobile payment methods and discount codes work.
• Offer logic holds up: reach a discount or gift threshold, remove an item, and confirm the cart updates correctly on desktop and on a phone.
• Analytics and campaign attribution are recording correctly.
• Customer Success and support teams have the latest offer details.

Test under realistic conditions, not just in a quiet preview. Before moving its setup to Rebuy, York St Brands had free-gift logic that broke under peak traffic. After the switch, the team reported no free-gift issues during BFCM.

Build a more profitable BFCM promotion

A promotion can bring in plenty of orders and still leave you with little profit. Price it with product costs, shipping, payment fees, and acquisition spend in mind.

Set your margin floor first

Decide the lowest contribution margin you’ll accept on an order, using your real product costs, shipping, payment fees, and acquisition spend. That number caps how deep any discount can go, and every offer you consider should clear it.

Check the math before choosing a discount

An item sells for $40 and costs $16 to make. Before a discount, its gross profit is $24. At 25% off, the selling price falls to $30 and gross profit to $14. You'd need to sell about 71% more units to match the original gross profit, before shipping, fees, or advertising.

Now compare two hypothetical orders:

The bundle earns more per order here. Whether it wins overall depends on how many people buy it and what those orders cost to acquire.

Set a free shipping threshold your margins can support

If your average order is $65 and a popular add-on costs $18, a $79 free-shipping threshold may be easier to reach than $100. Before choosing it, account for:

• The shipping subsidy
• The add-on’s margin
• Orders that would have qualified without buying anything extra

Offer value without a bigger markdown

A useful set, a well-chosen gift, or early access for loyal customers may be more appealing than another discount. Reserve steep markdowns for products whose inventory and margins justify them.

The cost difference can be large. A gift that costs you $4, added to a $90 order, can feel generous. A 15% discount on the same order takes $13.50 off the price.

York St Brands, which runs three beauty and haircare brands, built its offers around bundles and gifts with purchase. Over a 30-day period with Rebuy, the three brands saw AOV lifts of 18% to 24%.

Increase order value without relying on bigger discounts

The best add-ons feel like part of the purchase, not an interruption. Judge them by both order value and profit.

Bundle products that belong together

• Build around combinations customers already buy, such as a skincare routine or a set of entertaining essentials.
• Use purchase history to choose the products, then check stock and margin before setting a price.
• For customers who want to choose the items themselves, Rebuy Bundle Builder offers a flexible option.

Two examples: Unwilted, a paper-flower brand, lets shoppers build their own bouquet with Bundle Builder, and its AOV lift reached 21.47% in November 2025. Outside of BFCM, Olive & Piper built a bridal bundle the same way and saw a 63.78% AOV lift over a 30-day period.

Recommend products that complement what's in the cart

A few well-matched suggestions beat a long list of unrelated products. Rebuy Smart Cart can show relevant add-ons alongside the customer’s cart.

Show progress toward free shipping

A progress bar makes the incentive easy to understand. If someone has $62 in their cart and free shipping starts at $75, they can see they're $13 away. A relevant $15 accessory gives them a practical option to qualify.

Choose the threshold using the margin and shipping math covered earlier. Then watch conversion and contribution profit alongside AOV.

Make gifts with purchase worthwhile

Pick a gift that feels worthwhile and leaves enough margin after the gift, packing, and shipping costs.

Show complementary products in context

A home goods brand might show serving pieces alongside tableware; an apparel brand might suggest a layer that works with an outfit. Place suggestions where they help customers make a choice, and compare results by category.

Fashion brand Orla Kiely, working with its agency Farrows, showed matching bags and purses on product pages, lower-priced add-ons in the cart, and a recently viewed carousel across the site. AOV rose 12% over 30 days, and the recently viewed carousel was its strongest performer. When a new collection launches, its recommendations show only that collection, so a new product never appears beside a sale item.

Use personalization to improve conversion and order value

Personalization is most useful when it responds to what a shopper is viewing, buying, or has purchased before. That might mean:

• Better search results
• A relevant cart add-on
• A timely reorder reminder

The effects of conversion and order value can add up. With 10,000 sessions, 300 orders at an $80 AOV produce $24,000. At 320 orders and an $85 AOV, revenue becomes $27,200, a 13.3% increase. These are illustrative numbers, not a performance forecast.

Turn more BFCM traffic into customers

A good offer won’t help much if shoppers can’t find it, understand it, or check out.

Improve product discovery during BFCM

Search helps customers find specific products. Merchandising shapes what they discover while browsing. During BFCM, both should reflect your current offers and inventory.

• Feature products that fit the promotion, not just your usual best sellers.
• Keep collections up to date and handle sold-out items.
• Check that search recognizes the terms customers actually use.
• Send shoppers to the products they came for. An email about holiday entertaining, for example, should link to the featured collection rather than a generic homepage.

Keep email and SMS relevant

• Schedule early access, launch, reminder, and final-day messages around the real offer dates.
• Use what you know about customers, and their messaging permissions, to avoid sending everyone the same thing.

Make checkout easy to complete

• Show shipping costs and discount terms before the final payment step.
• Offer appropriate express payment methods and test checkout on mobile.
• Make it easy to return to a saved cart where your setup supports it.

Bring shoppers back to unfinished purchases

• Send timely, permission-based reminders while the offer is still valid.
• Check that the link, discount, and inventory will still work when someone returns.

Answer questions before they become reasons to leave

• Keep reviews, delivery estimates, return policies, and real offer deadlines easy to find.
• Skip fake countdowns and manufactured urgency.

Give new and returning customers different paths

• New visitors may need comparisons or a place to start.
• Returning customers may want to reorder or find something that works with a past purchase.
• Test a small number of meaningful customer groups before adding more.

Increase revenue at checkout and beyond

Keep checkout offers relevant

A checkout offer appears before the customer pays. Keep it to one useful addition, such as a compatible charging cable with a device, and make it easy to decline.

Checkout customization depends on your Shopify plan and the extensions available to your store. Rebuy Checkout Extensions supports eligible checkout offers; confirm what your setup allows before launch.

Offer complementary products after checkout

Post-purchase offers appear after payment for the original order. Depending on the setup, customers may be able to accept an additional item without entering payment details again.

A customer who buys a coffee machine, for example, might see a compatible accessory. Track acceptance and refunds, but judge the offer on added profit and customer response, not attributed revenue alone.

Because the original order is already complete, a post-purchase offer can’t get in the way of checkout. On Black Friday 2024, Au Vodka’s post-purchase offers converted at 10.57%. Outside of BFCM, record label Polyvinyl offers a mystery record from its catalog at a steep discount after checkout, and 15% of shoppers accepted it over six months.

Consider subscriptions for products customers replenish

Subscriptions can suit products customers use up, such as coffee or supplements.

• Be clear about price, delivery frequency, renewals, and cancellation.
• Check which subscription actions your checkout setup supports.

Keep thank-you and order-status pages useful

Thank-you and order-status pages can help customers find order details, support, or a useful next step. Don’t let promotions get in the way of that information.

Give BFCM shoppers a reason to return

The follow-up should fit the purchase. Someone buying a gift needs different information from someone buying a product they’ll use every month.

Focus on winning the second purchase

The first repeat order is the hardest to earn. Across 13 DTC brands, BS&Co found that a median of 22.9% of first-time customers placed a second order. Of those who did, 37.8% went on to place a third. BFCM customers tend to come back less often than average, so plan this step deliberately.

Time follow-ups to when customers come back

Second purchases tend to come sooner than many post-purchase flows assume. In a BS&Co analysis of 156,110 customers, half of second purchases happened within 30 days of the first order, and about three quarters within 90 days. A sequence that waits a month to suggest the next purchase can miss many of those customers.

A starting point to adapt:

Adjust the timing to your own data. Find the median number of days between first and second orders in your store, and send the first reorder message before that point, not after it. Time messages from delivery rather than the order date, since peak-season shipping can take longer. Gift buyers may not use what they bought, so holiday gift ideas or gift cards may serve them better than usage tips.

Lead with what they already bought

In the same BS&Co dataset, 77% of second purchases were reorders of the same product, and 23% were cross-sells. The split varies by category: supplement buyers reordered most often, while home decor buyers almost never did. For products customers use up, the easiest second sale is more of what they already trust. Cross-sells fit better for products people don’t use up.

Use purchase history to guide follow-up

• Start with whether someone is new or returning, then look at what they bought.
• Care tips, setup guidance, or a thoughtful follow-up product can be more useful than another sale announcement.

Make reordering convenient

• Time reorder reminders to when customers are likely to need more.
• Link reorder messages to a cart with the product already added, and offer a subscription where it fits.
• If you offer subscriptions, measure renewals and repeat orders, not just sign-ups.

Stay in touch without overdoing discounts

Don’t send another discount the moment an order is placed. Give customers time to receive and use what they bought, and save incentives for those who haven’t returned within your usual reorder window.

Keep the holiday experience current

• Keep gift guides, shipping deadlines, gift cards, and support information current through the holidays.
• Check how many BFCM customers return after 60 and 90 days, or later if your products have a longer buying cycle.

BFCM strategies for different types of brands

Beauty and personal care

• Create useful routines or sets.
• Offer trial sizes when the costs work. A small trial size can give shoppers a way to try something new without committing to a full-size product.
• Follow up when products may be running low.

Fashion and apparel

• Use coordinated outfits, accessories, and complete-the-look suggestions.
• Make size guidance and returns easy to find, especially when shoppers are buying gifts.

Health, wellness, and supplements

• Pair products that fit a routine.
• Explain subscription terms clearly.
• Plan replenishment around typical usage.
• Keep product and promotional claims accurate.

Food and beverage

• Try variety packs, gifts, and subscriptions where they make sense.
• Account for weight, perishability, shipping, and fulfillment costs.

Home and furnishings

• Show accessories and coordinated sets.
• Make delivery timing and oversized-item shipping costs clear, especially close to holiday deadlines.

Use these ideas as a starting point, then choose based on what your customers buy and what your margins allow.

Measure what matters after BFCM

Revenue is only part of the result. Look at what you kept after costs, how shoppers converted, and whether new customers came back.

The metrics that matter most

Use the same definitions throughout.

• Don’t subtract discounts twice.
• Update your results as returns arrive.
• Decide in advance how you’ll treat taxes, shipping charges, refunds, and overhead.
• Revenue per session equals orders per session × AOV. Using session conversion rate in that equation assumes one order per converting session.

Your BFCM scorecard

Compare with last BFCM and a typical trading period. That shows what changed. To find out whether a particular tactic caused a lift, run an experiment or holdout where practical.

Common BFCM mistakes to avoid

• Offering broad discounts without checking margins.
• Chasing AOV while overlooking conversion and contribution profit.
• Promoting products that are no longer available.
• Making major untested storefront changes during peak traffic.
• Treating attributed revenue as proof of incremental lift.
• Stopping customer communication at checkout.

BFCM FAQs

When are Black Friday and Cyber Monday in 2026?

Black Friday is November 27, and Cyber Monday is November 30.

When should Shopify brands start preparing?

Ideally, 60 to 90 days ahead. That gives you time to plan inventory, choose offers, and test the store. If you're starting later, prioritize the offer, checkout, inventory, and shipping information.

What should I prioritize with two weeks left?

Verify the offer, test mobile checkout, confirm inventory and shipping details, and check tracking. Add bundles or spending thresholds only if they're simple to launch and financially sound.

How can I run a sale without giving up too much margin?

Try selective bundles, useful add-ons, or achievable spending thresholds instead of defaulting to a larger sitewide discount. Compare contribution profit, not just sales.

What should I measure besides sales?

Look at conversion, revenue per session, contribution profit, and how many BFCM customers buy again. AOV is useful, but it doesn’t show whether an offer made money.

How can I reduce cart abandonment?

Show total costs early, make payment convenient, and test checkout on a phone. Send permission-based reminders when the offer and products are still available.

How do I know whether my promotion was profitable?

Subtract product costs, variable fulfillment expenses, payment fees, and attributable marketing spend from net sales. Use the same definitions across periods and update the result as returns come in.

Is BFCM worth it for a smaller Shopify store?

It can be, if the offer suits your customers, inventory, and margins. A reliable store and one well-planned promotion are more useful than several complex features you can't properly test.

How can I turn BFCM buyers into repeat customers?

Follow up based on what they bought, and start early. In one analysis of 156,110 customers, half of second purchases happened within 30 days of the first order. For products customers use up, lead with an easy reorder, and time reminders to when they may need more.

See where your store could earn more this BFCM

A good BFCM plan starts with what works for your store. Rebuy can help you put relevant recommendations and offers in the places they make sense, from product discovery through post-purchase.

See your revenue opportunities
See how Rebuy could work for your store, with a walkthrough focused on your products and goals.

Want to explore first? Browse the Ecommerce Tactics Deck, BFCM 2025 recap, or Rebuy’s educational sessions.