A Black Friday strategy that protects your margin
Marketing Specialist
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Are you feeling prepared for the upcoming Black Friday? You may not have thought about it yet, but it’s never too early to start planning for the biggest shopping event of the year. To help you make the most of it, we’ve 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 is past its glory days, 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 reports that more than 60% of consumers begin searching for Black Friday deals as early as October or November, meaning your promotions must 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.
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, showing how significant the opportunity is for e-commerce retailers.
This confirms that 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.
Let last year’s data guide this year’s targets
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 reviewing past Black Friday performance, studying key sales trends, and identifying products that resonated most with your customers. Close collaboration with your marketing, purchasing, and sales teams is essential to decode current market trends and align your offerings accordingly.
A framework for your Black Friday strategy
A great Black Friday strategy combines inventory management, product selection, and promotional efforts. You aim to ensure seamless operations, offer attractive deals, and improve the customer experience. This is where working with PriceShape becomes beneficial.
PriceShape is a pricing tool that provides dynamic pricing and analytics insights. In the context of Black Friday, PriceShape grants a competitive edge by providing real-time market data and enabling you to allocate your marketing spend on Google Shopping correctly. By aligning your pricing with market trends, you can strategically position your offerings to attract shoppers. Moreover, PriceShape’s data-driven insights help identify high-potential products for effective promotion, ensuring optimal use of your resources.
Allocate your Google Shopping budget for Black Friday
Black Friday is perhaps the most financially demanding day for advertising. You need a strategic approach to allocate your marketing budget. There is no one-size-fits-all strategy, but starting early and being data-driven makes a difference.
Create early teasers for your deals to take advantage of lower ad costs in the weeks leading up to the event. As Black Friday approaches, costs will rise, and competition will intensify.
→ Related article: Use campaign pricing to protect margins and improve performance
PriceShape helps you allocate your budget correctly. The data identifies standout products, ensuring your ad investments deliver maximum returns, especially on Google Shopping. You can also run flexible campaigns like “up to 50% off,” where each product meets a goal margin rather than applying a blanket discount—ideal for Black Friday.
Why a basket-opener strategy works
A smart Black Friday strategy doesn’t mean discounting your entire assortment. Focus on a handful of high-impact products, called basket openers, that attract traffic and encourage shoppers to add more items to their cart. These products should have strong conversion potential and solid margins.
Google Shopping rewards competitive pricing on key products, increasing visibility and lowering CPCs. By combining a basket-opener tactic with dynamic pricing strategies, you ensure only the right products receive a price advantage while keeping the rest of your assortment margin-protected.
→ Related article: Use basket openers to increase conversion and protect your margins
Step 1: Evaluate last year’s Black Friday performance
Analysing your product performance before Black Friday reveals insights into your successes and challenges. Review marketplace sales, marketing spend, product assortment, pricing, and profit. This full overview helps identify areas for improvement, such as popular items that sold out too quickly, and reevaluate your product performance and pricing.
To analyse your historical data, you need to collect it efficiently. PriceShape helps you manage all the relevant product pricing data to make informed strategies throughout the year. You can also explore our Sneak Peek feature for a quick preview of your product insights.
Step 2: Set goals for sales and earnings
Establish clear goals for your Black Friday sales and earnings. These serve as benchmarks for measuring success. Define your turnover and profit goals clearly and assign ownership for accountability. Achieving them requires coordination across teams to ensure everyone works toward the same objectives.
Step 3: Execute your sales strategy
To reach your goals, you need a clear plan. Break down targets into actionable categories such as suppliers, campaigns, and pricing. Use data from Step 1 to guide your decisions and base every action on facts, not assumptions.
Strong pricing strategies make the difference. Identify which products should be promoted as basket openers or bundled for larger orders, and which ones should be protected to maintain margins. With PriceShape, you can compare competitor prices in real time and adjust automatically, staying competitive without hurting profit.
Coordinate with suppliers early to secure stock and align with marketing to ensure all campaigns support your goals. A unified approach ensures consistency and success.
Step 4: Automate your pricing
Changing prices manually is time-consuming and risky during high-demand periods like Black Friday. A pricing tool such as PriceShape helps with automated pricing, reducing errors and saving time. Automation lets you set dynamic rules and ensure products always reflect optimal pricing.
Step 5: Build your marketing plan
Effective marketing is essential during Black Friday. Competition is intense, so promote strategically. For e-commerce, this often means optimising your Google Shopping campaigns. Decide which products perform best and align your marketing spend accordingly.
PriceShape helps identify high-performance products to maximise your marketing ROI. By integrating price data into your Google Feed, you can allocate budget to products where your pricing strategy is competitive rather than wasting it on uncompetitive listings.
Step 6: Have a Plan B for the unexpected
Black Friday and Cyber Week are critical for e-commerce. Consumers expect great deals and a seamless experience. Prepare a contingency plan to handle issues such as system failures, high traffic, payment errors, or low stock. Delegate responsibilities so everyone knows what to do in each scenario. Being ready for challenges gives you the best chance of success.
By implementing PriceShape early, you gain an advantage for Black Friday. Market intelligence and historical data make data-driven decisions possible with the help of Penny, our AI Pricing Analyst. Preparation is key; start early, analyse past performance, set goals, optimise pricing and marketing, and have a backup plan. These steps put you on track for a successful Black Friday.
Get the data behind your Black Friday strategy
Our Black Friday 2026 report looks at what UK, German and Benelux shoppers actually did last Black Friday, based on data from our own platform. One finding matters directly for the steps above: the deepest discounts landed the week before Black Friday, yet most shoppers still waited for the day itself, leaving retailers to protect margin during that gap. Read the full report for the regional breakdown and what it means for your pricing.
FAQ
What should a Black Friday pricing strategy include?
A Black Friday pricing strategy should cover three things: your starting prices, how far you are willing to discount, and the point at which a deal no longer makes commercial sense. Without those three set in advance, price changes on the day tend to be reactive rather than planned.
How do I protect my margin during Black Friday?
Set a price floor for each product before the sale starts, so no discount can go deeper than what still makes commercial sense. Automated pricing rules help here, they apply the floor consistently across your whole catalogue, even when hundreds of prices are changing at once.
What is a good Black Friday markdown strategy?
A good markdown strategy stages discounts instead of cutting every price by the same amount on day one. Slow moving stock can take a deeper cut early, while strong sellers hold their price until closer to the day, so margin is protected where it matters most.
How should I plan stock and inventory for Black Friday?
Rank your assortment by expected demand and margin, then make sure your best sellers are the ones you are least likely to run out of. Running out of a hero product on the day loses more revenue than a slow mover doing the same.
How far in advance should I plan for Black Friday?
Most of the groundwork is best done four to six weeks before Black Friday: reviewing last year’s performance, setting goals and preparing your pricing rules. That leaves time to test your approach rather than deciding under pressure on the day.
Can I automate my Black Friday pricing?
Yes. Automated pricing rules can adjust your prices within limits you set, based on competitor moves, stock levels and demand, without anyone manually checking every SKU on the day. This matters most on Black Friday, when prices change faster than any team can track by hand.