Black Friday marketing: the October work that decides the 27 November result

Black Friday falls on 27 November in 2026, with Cyber Monday on 30 November, and almost everything that decides how the week goes is built in October. The plan has five parts: choose one offer and set the margin floor it has to respect, build a sale page that stays at the same URL every year, mark the prices up so shopping surfaces show the reduction correctly, warm your own list before you spend on strangers, and get operations ready for a week where mistakes are expensive. A business that does those five things calmly beats a business that discounts deeper on the day.

The calendar, counted back from 27 November

• Eight weeks out. Decide the offer and the margin floor. Confirm stock and supplier lead times for anything you intend to promote. Check that your product feed is live and approved, because a feed rejected in peak week is a lost week.
• Four weeks out. Publish the sale page in its permanent position with next month's dates and a sign up for early access. Write the emails. Brief support on the offer, the returns window and the dispatch cut off.
• Two weeks out. Load campaigns and creative, paused. Test checkout on a phone on a slow connection. Confirm the discount mechanism works on a real order, including with a gift card and with a voucher stacked on top, then decide which combinations to block.
• The week itself. Open early access to your list before the public offer. Watch stock and dispatch rather than dashboards. Keep one person able to change prices and one person able to answer the phone.
• The Tuesday after. Leave the page up and switch it to the next thing: last dispatch dates for December, a bundle, a January service plan. Write the one page review while the numbers are fresh.

Choose one offer, then set the floor

Four shapes cover most of it: a flat percentage off a defined range, a bundle priced below the sum of its parts, a gift with purchase above a spend threshold, or early access for subscribers with nothing extra discounted. Pick one. Two offers running together confuse the shopper and make the reporting unreadable.

Then do the arithmetic before you commit. Take an item that sells for 100 and costs you 60, so gross profit is 40. Discount it by twenty per cent and it sells for 80 with gross profit of 20, which is half the profit per unit, so you need twice the units to stand still before you have paid for any advertising. That calculation sets your floor, and the floor is what you defend when somebody suggests going deeper on the Friday afternoon. If the sums do not work on a discount, use the bundle or the gift instead, because both protect the headline price and both are easier to withdraw in December.

The sale page, built once and kept

Create a permanent URL for the event and use it every year. Shoppers, links and your own emails all point at the same place, and the page accumulates authority instead of starting from nothing each November. In the off season it explains what the sale usually covers and collects email addresses for early access. In November it becomes the offer. On the Tuesday it becomes the next thing. It never returns a 404, and it never redirects to the homepage, which is the single most common error in retail calendars and the one that quietly throws away a year of links.

On the page itself: the offer in one sentence at the top, the dates and times including the time zone, what is excluded, the dispatch cut off, the returns window, and the delivery costs. Those are the questions support will otherwise answer a hundred times, and they are also the lines a shopper screenshots and sends to somebody else.

Mark the prices up so the reduction is machine readable

Sale prices in product markup have specific properties, and getting them wrong is why a genuine reduction sometimes shows as an ordinary price. Google's merchant listing documentation, checked on 12 October 2026, sets out the rules: the active price is required and goes in price with priceCurrency, or inside a priceSpecification; a strikethrough price, meaning the higher regular price shown during a sale, uses priceType set to https://schema.org/StrikethroughPrice; and the documentation says "Don't mark the active price with a priceType property". Sale duration is expressed with validFrom for the start and either validThrough or priceValidUntil for the end, in ISO 8601 format. availability is recommended, and so are shippingDetails and hasMerchantReturnPolicy. The reference is the merchant listing structured data page.

Do that work in October on a staging copy, validate it, and make sure whatever generates the markup can be switched on and off by date rather than by a developer at midnight. For the feed and account side of peak trading, our page on e-commerce PPC covers the structure that holds up when budgets rise.

Your own list first

The cheapest sales of the week come from people who already bought from you. Segment before you send: customers from the last twelve months, subscribers who opened something recently, and a lapsed group who get a different message. Send early access to the engaged group a day or two ahead, which gives you a readable signal on which products are moving before you commit budget to acquisition. Keep the sending volume growing steadily through November rather than jumping from nothing to everything on the Thursday, because a sudden spike after months of silence is the pattern inbox providers treat with most suspicion. For the numbers to judge the sends against, see email marketing benchmarks.

Channel	Prepared by	The one thing that breaks it
Product feed and shopping campaigns	Eight weeks out	Disapprovals found in peak week
Search and brand campaigns	Two weeks out, paused	Nobody bidding on your own name while competitors do
Email and SMS	Four weeks out, written	One send to the whole list with no segmentation
Sale page and markup	Four weeks out, live	A page created on the day and deleted after it
Dispatch and support	Two weeks out, staffed	A cut off date published nowhere

If you are a service business or you sell B2B

Discounting an hourly rate in November trains clients to wait for November. Use the week differently: sell capacity rather than price, with a booked January slot at this year's rate, an annual plan paid up front with an extra month of service, or a paid audit that converts into work. Offices are quiet that week and decision makers are clearing budgets, so a clear, time limited commercial proposition lands well. Keep the same discipline about the page and the dates, and keep the offer available only inside a stated window so the price integrity holds for the rest of the year.

Black Friday questions retailers ask in October

How deep should the discount be?

As deep as your margin floor allows and no deeper, with the floor calculated per product rather than across the catalogue. Where the arithmetic is tight, move to a bundle or a gift with purchase, both of which raise average order value instead of cutting the headline price.

Should I discount everything or a selected range?

A defined range, chosen for stock position and margin, with the exclusions stated on the page. A sitewide reduction is simple to communicate and hands away profit on products that were selling at full price anyway.

When should the sale start?

Open early access to your list in the days before and the public offer on the Friday, running through to Cyber Monday on 30 November. Publish the exact start and end times with the time zone, and hold to them, because a sale that quietly extends teaches people that your deadlines are decorative.

Is it worth it for a small shop?

Yes, with one offer, your own list, and operations you can staff. The smaller the business, the more the week is about clearing specific stock and winning new customers you can sell to in January, rather than about matching anybody's discount.

What do I do on the Tuesday after?

Switch the page to December dispatch dates, email the people who bought with a thank you and a reason to come back, and write a one page review: what sold, at what margin, where the orders came from, and which thing you will prepare earlier next year.

What a shopper is told about your sale when they do not come to your site

Peak week is when people compare in a hurry, and a lot of that comparing now happens by asking an assistant: is this offer actually good, is this shop reliable, what is the returns window. The answer gets assembled from whatever is readable about you, which is your sale page if it is up and crawlable, your returns policy if it is written in plain text rather than buried in a PDF, and your reviews. This is the practical reason a permanent sale page beats a temporary one: a page that exists for four days has nothing behind it when somebody asks in week three of November. AI Knows Us reads what the assistants currently say about a named shop and shows the pages behind each answer, which is a sensible thing to check in October while there is still time to publish the terms they will be quoting from.