Are you feeling prepared for the upcoming Black Friday? While it may still be September, it's never too early to start thinking about and planning for the biggest shopping event of the year. To help you make the most of Black Friday, we have put together six crucial steps to ensure you have all the necessary information and strategies before the big day arrives.
Why is Black Friday relevant for you?
You might hear claims that Black Friday has faded into the past, but the data paints a different picture, especially for E-commerce businesses. Despite talk of its decline, Black Friday continues to grow, especially online.
Demandsage has some interesting Black Friday shopping statistics based on 2024 and 2025 data. More than 60% of consumers begin searching for Black Friday deals as early as October or November, which means your promotions need to be visible long before the event itself. When the week arrives, price is the most crucial factor for 74.9% of shoppers, making competitive pricing the single biggest driver of conversions.
The sales potential is just as clear. Online sales typically more than double during Black Friday week, rising by 122% to 125% compared to a normal week. In Europe, nearly half of all consumers (46%) made an online purchase during Black Friday, underlining how significant the opportunity is for e-commerce retailers.
For businesses, this confirms one thing: a winning black friday strategy depends on preparing early, leading with competitive prices, and directing budget into the right channels such as Google Shopping and social media campaigns.
More than 60% of consumers search for Black Friday deals as early as October or November.
Price is the most crucial purchase factor for 74.9% of consumers during Black Friday week.
Online sales typically double during Black Friday week compared to an average week, increasing by +122% to +125%.
Data from Europe shows that 46% of consumers made an online purchase during Black Friday.
Data is your superpower
The above section shows that data is your guiding star in strategic decision-making. Leading up to Black Friday, your role involves tapping into historical data to collect valuable insights. This means thoroughly reviewing past Black Friday performance, studying key sales trends, and identifying the products that resonated most with your customers. Also, close collaboration with your marketing, purchasing, and sales teams is essential to decode current market trends and align your offerings accordingly.
Building an effective strategy framework
A great Black Friday strategy entails carefully combining inventory management, product selection, and promotional efforts. You aim to ensure seamless operations, offer attractive deals, and enhance the customer experience. Here, the partnership with PriceShape becomes beneficial.
PriceShape is a tool that provides you with dynamic pricing and analytics insights. In the context of Black Friday, PriceShape grants a competitive edge by providing real-time market data and authorizing you to make informed decisions on allocating your marketing spend on Google shopping correctly. You can strategically position your offerings to attract shoppers by aligning your pricing with prevailing market trends. Moreover, PriceShape's data-driven insights help identify high-potential products for effective promotion on Google Shopping, ensuring optimal allocation of your resources.
Allocate your marketing budget correctly on Google Shopping
Black Friday is perhaps the most financially demanding day for advertising. Therefore, you need to develop a strategic approach to how you want to allocate your marketing budget on this specific occasion. It would have been easy if we could tell you the right strategy for your business, but unfortunately, there is no one-size-fits-all solution to apply.
You can create early "teasers" for your deals, taking advantage of the cost-effectiveness in the weeks leading up to the event. However, maintaining relevance over an extended period can be challenging, and competitors can swiftly replicate and respond to your advertisements. As Black Friday draws closer, the digital marketing cost tends to escalate.
→ Related article: Use campaign pricing to protect margins and improve performance
PriceShape can provide data that can help you allocate this budget more correctly. The data guides you in identifying standout products, guaranteeing that your advertising investments yield maximum rewards, especially on Google Shopping. We also make it possible for you to run flexible campaigns like “up to 50% off”, where not every product has the same discount, but each product is priced to meet a goal margin. This is perfect for a Black Friday strategy on specific products.
Use a basket-opener strategy to optimize your Google Shopping budget
A smart Black Friday strategy doesn’t mean discounting your entire assortment. Instead, focus on a handful of high-impact products, which we call basket-openers, that attract traffic and influence customers to add more items to their cart. These products should have strong conversion potential and solid margins, so they bring shoppers in without draining profitability.
Google Shopping rewards competitive pricing on key products, boosting visibility and lowering CPCs across your campaigns. By combining a basket-opener tactic with dynamic pricing strategies, you ensure that only the right products receive a price advantage, while the rest of your assortment remains margin-protected.
→ Related article: Use basket openers to increase conversion and protect your margins
Step 1 - Evaluate last year's Black Friday performance
Analyzing your website's performance before Black Friday will provide insights into the successes and challenges you encountered. Analyze marketplace sales, marketing spend, product assortment, pricing, profit, logistics, and staffing. Doing this full overview will help identify areas for improvement, such as popular items that quickly run out of stock, and reevaluate your product performance as well as product pricing.
For you to analyze your historical data, you will need to make sure that you collect and gather such data. This can be a difficult and time-consuming task. PriceShape can help you manage all the relevant data needed to make the right strategies throughout the year. We can provide historical data from the day you start as our customer. You will need to begin collecting relevant historical data now for you to have data that can be usable for your Black Friday strategy.
Step 2 - Set goals for sales and earnings
Establish clear goals for your Black Friday sales and earnings. These goals serve as benchmarks to evaluate your performance and ensure you're on track to meet your ambitions. Define your target turnover and earnings goals clearly. Setting these clear goals increases your chances of success. Assigning an owner to each goal is an excellent idea to ensure accountability and to oversee the progress. Remember, achieving these goals involves multiple steps and collaboration from various team members, so you can be ready for a successful Black Friday.
Step 3 - Implement a sales execution strategy
To reach your Black Friday goals, you need a clear plan of execution. Start by breaking down your targets into actionable categories such as suppliers, campaigns, and pricing. Use the historical data from Step 1 to guide your decisions, making sure that each action is backed by facts, not guesses.
This is where strong pricing strategies make the difference. Identify which products should be promoted as “basket openers” or “traffic drivers,” which ones should be bundled to increase basket size, and which ones can be protected to maintain margins. With PriceShape, you can compare competitor prices in real time and adjust automatically, ensuring you stay competitive without sacrificing profit.
Execution also extends beyond pricing. Align with suppliers early to secure stock and negotiate terms, and coordinate with marketing so that promotions, campaigns, and ads support the same overall objectives. When these elements work together, your Black Friday plan becomes a unified strategy instead of disconnected initiatives.
Step 4 - Automate pricing processes
Changing prices can be time-consuming, particularly during high-demand periods like Black Friday. Manual updates also increase the risk of errors. A pricing tool like PriceShape can help with automated pricing solutions and streamlines this process. Automating your pricing allows you to allocate time to determine optimal prices based on historical data, where you can create pricing strategies and rules to categorize products and ensure that your products have the right price.
Step 5 - Develop a strategic marketing plan
Effective product marketing is crucial, especially during Black Friday. With significant competition, it's essential to promote your products strategically. For an e-commerce business, does allocating the marketing budget include looking into Google Shopping? Here, you'll need to invest time and effort into deciding which products perform best and aligning your marketing budget accordingly.
PriceShape can assist you in identifying these high-performance products, maximizing the impact of your marketing efforts. We can improve your Google Feed with price data, letting you allocate your budget to the products where your pricing strategy is set to match your competitors instead of being allocated to products where you are not competitive.
Step 6 - Plan B for the unexpected
Black Friday and Cyber Week are critical for e-commerce companies. Consumers expect great deals and a smooth shopping experience. It's vital to have a contingency plan in case of unexpected events. Anticipating potential challenges and creating a plan to address them will help you when the day arrives. It is a good idea for you to delegate the responsibilities within your team to ensure everyone knows how to handle different scenarios. Consider scenarios like system failures, heavy website traffic, payment method issues, employee absences, or the need for additional stock. Doing this prepares you for the worst scenario, giving you the best outcome.
By implementing PriceShape now, you'll gain a significant advantage for Black Friday. Collect valuable data to inform your decision-making process and make data-driven strategies and goals. With a solid plan, you can also enjoy the festivities and celebrate Black Friday together as a company.
Remember, preparation is key to a winning Black Friday strategy. Start early, analyze past performance, set goals, optimize sales execution, automate pricing, create a marketing plan, and be ready for contingencies. With these steps, you'll be well on your way to a successful Black Friday.
