Shopify Black Friday Checklist

Black Friday 2026 falls on November 27, and Cyber Monday on November 30. Most Black Friday checklists were written for a store with a year of history behind it. Pull last year’s sales report. Segment your repeat buyers. Warm up your retargeting audience. Call your supplier and get ahead of their cutoff. If your store went live a few months ago, or a few weeks ago, a good half of that advice does not apply to you, and working through it anyway is how people spend October busy and arrive at November unprepared.

This is the other version of the list. It assumes you have no prior-year numbers, no repeat-buyer segment, and no audience of any size. It also assumes you would rather do eight things properly than twenty-five things badly.

The one number that decides your whole plan

Before anything else, work out your gross margin on your three best-selling products. Selling price minus what the product and the shipping actually cost you, divided by the selling price.

That number decides your discount, your ad spend, and whether you should be discounting at all. A store selling at 45% margin can run 25% off and still make money on every order. A print-on-demand store at 28% margin cannot, because the base cost is fixed by the supplier and the discount comes entirely out of your share. Nobody can tell you your number but you, and almost nobody works it out before they set the discount.

We build Shopify stores for people who have never run one, and the first thing new owners reach for in November is the discount slider. The question we end up asking is what their floor price is, and almost nobody has one. Decide the lowest price you are willing to sell each product at before you decide what the sale looks like, and the rest of this list gets easier.

Eight weeks out: decisions, not tasks

Pick your offer and your mechanic together

An offer is “20% off everything over $50.” A mechanic is how Shopify applies it. Those are two different choices and the second one gets skipped.

Shopify gives you two. An automatic discount applies at checkout without the shopper doing anything. A discount code has to be typed in. Codes are useful when you want to track a channel or a creator, and they are the reason a chunk of mobile shoppers abandon the cart, because the code is in an email in another app and the field is one more thing to get wrong. Unless you specifically need to attribute the sale, use an automatic discount.

Both live under Discounts in your Shopify admin, and you can build and test them before the sale is anywhere near live. If you are not on a plan yet, a Shopify trial is enough to set the discount up and place a test order against it.

If you plan to stack offers, set the combination rules while you are in there. Shopify lets you mark a discount as combinable with shipping or product discounts, and a free-shipping offer that silently cancels your 20% off is a bad thing to discover on Friday morning.

Decide what you are not discounting

Sitewide percentage off is the default because it takes ten seconds to set up. It is also the offer that costs you the most and teaches customers to wait for the next one.

Cheaper alternatives that read as generous: raise the free-shipping threshold and then remove it entirely for the weekend, discount bundles rather than single units, or add something that costs you nothing to ship. The promotion ideas that hold up on thin margins are worth reading before you commit to a number, because the choice you make here is hard to walk back once it is in an email.

Start collecting emails now, not in November

This is the one piece of standard advice that matters more for a new store than an old one. You have no list, so every week between now and Black Friday is a week of list building you cannot get back.

A single popup offering early access to the sale, running from now, will do more for your BFCM than any ad you run during it. Early access is also a real offer that costs you nothing: subscribers get the sale on Wednesday, everyone else gets it on Friday.

Set up a store that can take the traffic

If you have not built the store yet, build it now rather than in November, and build it on something you are not going to be fighting during the sale. You can start a Shopify trial and have the store live the same day, and our generator will fill it with products, collections and copy so the thing you are optimising in week six is a finished store rather than an empty theme.

Four weeks out: the store itself

By now the decisions are made and the work is mechanical. Six things, in this order.

1. Audit your apps and delete the ones you forgot. Every app you trialled and abandoned is still loading scripts on every page. Uninstalling an app does not always remove the code it injected into your theme, so check theme.liquid and your snippets for leftovers from apps that are no longer installed.
2. Test on a phone, on cellular, not on wifi. Your store on office wifi is not your store on a train. More than half of holiday transactions happen on a phone, and the checkout is where a slow store loses them.
3. Read your internal site search report. Shopify records what people type into your store’s search box under Analytics. Those are your customers telling you, in their own words, what they came for and could not find. Put the top five on the homepage.
4. Fix the product pages for your three best sellers only. Real photos, the actual dimensions, what is in the box, delivery estimate. Not all forty products. Three.
5. Write your shipping cutoff dates and put them where they are visible. “Order by December 18 for delivery before Christmas” prevents more support tickets than any FAQ page.
6. Set your return window deliberately. A standard 30-day window on a November 27 order expires on December 27, which lands in the middle of gift-returning season and reads as mean. Extending returns to the end of January costs you very little and removes a real objection.

Speed work is worth doing properly rather than broadly. Our Shopify SEO checklist covers the technical items that help all year, not only in November, and the theme you picked matters more than most single fixes. If you are still choosing, the best free Shopify themes are faster than most paid ones.

One week out: freeze everything

Pick a date, put it in writing, and stop changing the store after it. Ten days before Black Friday is about right.

After the freeze date: no new apps, no theme updates, no checkout changes, no “quick” code edits. Everything that breaks a store during BFCM breaks because somebody changed something on the Wednesday. Content is fine. Prices are fine. Code is not.

In the same week, do the four things that are easy to leave until it is too late:

• Place a full test order yourself, on a phone, on cellular data, with the discount applied, through to the confirmation email. Then refund it. Get someone who did not build the store to do it too, because you will click past the thing that confuses them.
• Write your bad-news emails in advance. One for sold out, one for delayed shipping, one for an item that cannot arrive before Christmas. Writing them calmly in November beats writing them at midnight on the Saturday.
• Tell your payment provider what is coming. A store that has been taking $200 a day and suddenly takes $6,000 can trigger a fraud review or a payout hold, and support queues are long that weekend. A short message to your provider beforehand is free.
• Check your stock arithmetic against your suppliers’ cutoffs, not your own. If you sell products you do not hold, your supplier’s processing time and their holiday closure are your delivery promise. Ask them for both in writing.

The weekend itself

Watch three things and ignore everything else.

Conversion rate by device. If mobile conversion collapses and desktop holds, the problem is the checkout, not the offer, and it is usually fixable in an hour.

Where orders are coming from. Whichever channel is actually producing sales by Friday lunchtime is where the rest of your budget should go by Friday evening. Not where you expected it to be.

Your floor price. You set one in September. Do not move it at 11pm because sales are slower than you hoped. The stores that lose money on Black Friday almost always lose it in a panic discount on the Saturday.

Resist adding new offers mid-weekend. If nothing is selling, the fix is more traffic to the offer you have, not a third offer nobody has seen. Our guide to getting traffic to a Shopify store is the better use of the hour.

The week after, which everyone skips

The money in BFCM for a new store is not the weekend. It is the customer list the weekend produces, and the window to use it is short.

• Send the second-purchase email in the first week of December, while they still remember buying from you.
• Ask the buyers one question by email: what nearly stopped you from ordering? You will get more usable answers in a week than in the rest of the year, because these are real buyers rather than survey respondents.
• Write down what your actual conversion rate, average order value and refund rate were. Next year this is the prior-year data you did not have this year, and it takes fifteen minutes to record and months to reconstruct.
• Keep the discount off. A store that runs a second sale in the second week of December has told its list to never pay full price again.

If the weekend proves the store works, the next thing worth your time is turning the one-off buyers into repeat ones. Building a brand rather than a storefront is what separates the stores still running in March.

What you can safely skip this year

This is the part the other checklists will not tell you. If your store has no sales history, these items are not shortcuts you are taking, they are instructions that cannot be followed.

• Retargeting past visitors. Meta will not deliver to a custom audience until it matches at least 100 people. A pixel you installed in October on a low-traffic store has not reached that, so there is no audience to retarget. Install the pixel anyway so that next year you have one, then spend the budget on something that works now.
• Segmenting by past purchase behaviour. There is no behaviour yet. One good email to your whole list beats four segments of eleven people.
• Forecasting inventory from last year’s demand. You have no last year. Ask your supplier what their lead time becomes in November and plan around that instead.
• Load testing for a traffic surge. Shopify’s infrastructure handles the traffic. What fails on a small store is a slow theme and a bloated app stack, which is the audit above, not a load test.
• Building a loyalty program before you have customers. Build it in January with the list Black Friday gave you.
• Going international. Adding currencies, duties and delivery promises in November adds three ways to disappoint someone. Next year.

Start from a store that is already set up

Most of this list is faster on a store that was built properly in the first place: a fast theme, product pages that are already written, collections that already exist, and no stack of half-installed apps to unpick.

That is the part we handle. Our AI store generator builds a complete Shopify store, products and copy included, so the work in front of you is the offer and the emails rather than the setup. If you do not have a store yet and Black Friday is the reason you are finally doing it, open your Shopify trial and have something real to work with this week.

Once it is live, the promotion ideas worth running on a small store is the natural next thing to read, because choosing the offer is the decision everything else on this page depends on.