The 2026 BFCM playbook: plan your biggest sale months ahead

Black Friday 2026 is Friday 27 November; Cyber Monday is Monday 30 November. The end of the sale is the same for almost everyone. When it starts is your choice: Friday itself, a Black Week from Monday 23 November, or early access for your waitlist from mid-November.

This playbook counts back from T-0, the day your prices go public, using a 27 November launch as the example. Running Black Week? Shift every window a week earlier. Early access? Two weeks. By launch you'll have:

• one goal with a number attached, and three product groups tagged
• one headline offer, a codes policy, and every phase dated in one timezone
• one sale URL, scheduled campaigns, and emails timed after go-live
• a rehearsed reset, so the morning after takes care of itself

None of it needs code. The campaign brief and weekly checklist at the end turn the plan into assigned tasks.

Define the BFCM goal first

Choose one primary goal before picking products or discount levels. It should guide both the offer and how you judge the results.

You can have a secondary goal, but decide which takes priority. A deep sitewide discount might increase revenue while leaving less margin and selling stock you didn't need to clear.

Write the goal and the target number at the top of your campaign brief. Everything below refers back to it.

8–6 weeks out: choose the products

For a 27 November launch: roughly 2–16 October. A week earlier for Black Week; two weeks earlier for early access.

Bestsellers vs. overstock

Bestsellers can attract shoppers, but some would sell at full price anyway. Older stock may need a deeper offer to move. Split the sale into three groups:

• Headline products. A small group of hero items with a strong, visible offer. Their job is to earn the click from the email or the ad.
• Volume products. The broad middle of the catalog at your standard BFCM depth. Their job is to turn the visit into a bigger basket.
• Clearance products. Aged or discontinued stock at a deeper discount. Their job is to leave the warehouse.

Give each group a discount level that matches its role and margin. For each headline product, compare stock on hand with expected demand and decide what happens if it sells out: feature a replacement, offer a waitlist, or direct shoppers to the rest of the collection.

Decide the exclusions now

The products you don't discount matter as much as the ones you do. Typical exclusions:

• new arrivals and current-season launches,
• low-margin lines where 20% off means selling at a loss,
• products with a minimum advertised price from the brand,
• gift cards, pre-orders, and services,
• items that are already reduced (so you don't discount them twice),
• hero SKUs you'd rather protect than devalue.

Record the exclusions now so they are part of the setup from the start.

Organize the products with tags or collections

Tag the groups (bfcm26-headline, bfcm26-volume, bfcm26-clearance, bfcm-exclude) or organize them into collections. Product type and vendor can also work as filters.

These groups make the selection easier to review and reuse, whether you apply prices with the bulk editor, a CSV, or an app. Disco selects campaign products by collection, tag, type, or vendor and lets you add exclusions on top, so a tag-based assortment maps directly onto three campaigns with three discount levels. But the tagging discipline is worth doing whichever tool applies the prices.

6–4 weeks out: design the offer

For a 27 November launch: roughly 16–30 October.

Choose the shape of your sale

Cyber Monday is the deadline whichever shape you choose. What changes is when the price drops, and for whom.

The first two shapes are the campaigns you build anyway, one per product group, sharing a start and an end. The last two add a second, lighter layer on the same products. In Disco a product can sit in several campaigns at once and the highest discount wins, calculated from the original price: a 20% campaign from 16 November plus a 30% campaign from 27 November gives a $1,000 product an $800 price for the waitlist and $700 from Friday, with nothing to switch over on the night. The timer always counts down to the end of the campaign currently setting the price.

The same mechanism gives you a Cyber Week tail without moving a deadline: let the lighter campaign run to 4 December while the headline campaign ends on Monday night, and prices step from 30% to 20% to regular.

Pick the headline and how each offer applies

Choose a headline that matches what shoppers will find. "30% off selected styles, 50% off last season" sets a clearer expectation than "up to 50% off" above mostly 10% reductions. Make the exclusions easy to find.

Then decide the mechanism. A sale price (Price lowered, Compare-at price set to the original) is visible on every product page and collection card from the first click. A discount (a code or an automatic discount) leaves the product price alone and shows up at checkout. Use the sale price for the headline and for each product group's depth, one campaign per group; use discounts for the extras. How to show sale prices on Shopify product pages before checkout has the detail.

Disco handles the catalog-price layer: bulk sale pricing with compare-at display, scheduled start and end, and the storefront elements around it. Build a Buy X Get Y, gift-with-purchase, or free-shipping offer natively in Shopify's Discounts section and run it alongside the campaign; those are cart rules, not price changes. Bundles and upsells are a different tool for a different job.

Fix the dates and phases

Give each phase a date, time, and timezone. Confirm which timezone the scheduler uses. Here's an example for 2026 using the early-access shape; for a weekend-only sale, drop the early-access row and move the teaser to 13 November:

Decide now whether you'll run a Cyber Week tail. Schedule it from the start as its own, lighter campaign with its own end, so the BFCM deadline you've advertised stays true.

Reference prices. In the EU and several other markets, the "before" price you show must reflect the lowest price you charged in a recent window (commonly 30 days). Two consequences: keep the weeks before your first campaign free of separate sales on the same products, and make sure your Compare-at price is a price you can evidence. A Black Week or early-access phase that runs into Black Friday as one continuous, progressively deeper sale generally keeps the pre-campaign price as the reference, which is also how Disco calculates overlapping campaigns. Check the rules for the markets you sell in; this is not legal advice.

Decide which codes can stay active

Welcome, abandoned-cart, loyalty, influencer, and affiliate codes all apply to the reduced price unless you stop them. A 20% sale plus a 10% code is a 28% discount, and during BFCM every one of those codes finds its way to checkout.

Run the numbers before you decide. These examples exclude tax and other costs such as payment fees:

The extra code cuts what's left per unit from $300 to $220, so you need about 2.3 times the volume to earn what one unit earned at regular price. Repeat the calculation for your headline products.

Then pick a policy; most campaigns use more than one:

1. Pause codes that shouldn't apply. End the welcome code the day before your first campaign and restart it afterwards; change the popup copy so you aren't promising 10% you won't honour.
2. Use Shopify's combination settings for how discounts combine with each other. They don't cover a sale price, which isn't a discount object, so on their own they won't stop a code applying to a reduced price.
3. Block codes during the campaign. Disco can block additional discount codes while a campaign is active; test any automatic discounts separately.
4. Allow a planned extra discount, say 5% for loyalty members, and put that reduction in the worksheet and the brief.

Write the decision in the brief so marketing, support, and the campaign owner give customers the same answer. Stop discount stacking and protect margin covers the combination rules and the audit in detail.

4–2 weeks out: build the sale destination

For a 27 November launch: roughly 30 October – 13 November.

Give the sale one destination URL

Point your emails, ads, social posts, and homepage banner to one sale URL. A collection can work well because you can keep it available after the campaign and reuse it next year.

You can build the collection manually or as an automated collection driven by a tag. Disco can generate the sale collection from a campaign's products, and on higher plans auto-tag them so an automated "On sale" collection fills when the campaign starts and empties when it ends. Either way, the collection should exist and be linked in navigation before launch, even if it shows "coming soon" until the prices change.

A coming-soon page and a waitlist

A coming-soon page gives interested shoppers somewhere to sign up before launch. Keep the teaser short and explain what joining the waitlist gets them.

Disco supports this lifecycle directly: a coming-soon page before the campaign, a scheduled announcement bar that collects email addresses, and a flash-sale page that publishes when the campaign starts and comes down when it ends. Addresses land in your Shopify customer list with tags, so the early-access segment is ready without exporting anything.

You can also use a Shopify page, your existing newsletter form, and a customer tag or segment. Have the signup flow ready before you start promoting the waitlist.

Homepage and navigation

• Add a "Black Friday" link to the main menu pointing at the collection or coming-soon page.
• Prepare the homepage hero, but don't rely on publishing theme changes by hand at midnight. Point the hero at the sale collection URL; let the announcement bar and sale page carry the "it's live" state, since those can be scheduled.
• Check that your search results and any "recommended products" blocks won't surface excluded products with sale styling by accident.

The final two weeks: pre-flight

For a 27 November launch: roughly 13–27 November.

Schedule the emails and social

Plan messages for each phase. Adapt this sequence to your audience and usual sending frequency; you don't need every send.

A longer sale doesn't earn more emails. For a Black Week, add one mid-week send and keep the rest of the sequence; for early access, the price change on Friday is a second launch and deserves its own send. The last-call emails do more work than the launch email.

Three things to settle before you schedule:

• One deadline, everywhere. Timer, announcement bar, email footer, and Instagram story must show the same end time, or you've created a support ticket.
• When email prices update. Some tools pull prices at send time, others cache them. Schedule the launch email after the price change and check a test send once the sale is live.
• Support replies. Do codes work, when does it end, what if a price looks wrong, what if it sells out. Share them with whoever handles social comments.

Find every system that writes prices

Other integrations write to the same price fields as your campaign: ERP or inventory systems, supplier apps, marketplace connectors, pricing tools, scheduled imports. If one syncs the regular price after the sale starts, it overwrites the offer, and reapplying the discount won't fix a conflict that repeats on every sync.

Fill this table in for your store:

Three fixes, in order of preference: pause the other system's price sync for the sale window; exclude the campaign products from it; or run its sync before the campaign starts so the sale price is the last write. Our help article on why Disco discounts appear, then disappear later covers the fix, and When a Shopify discount disappears: troubleshooting price sync walks through finding the culprit.

Three smaller checks while you're at it:

• Shopify Markets. Market-specific pricing may not follow a base-price change identically; check one product per market in the rehearsal and at go-live.
• Product feeds and ads. A feed that refreshed at 22:00 on Thursday advertises full price until it runs again, and ad/landing-page mismatches get products disapproved. Trigger a refresh after go-live.
• Theme and cache. Confirm compare-at prices and badges show on collection cards and product pages; after launch, check in a private window before blaming the cache.

Rehearse the launch and the reset

A week before, run a real campaign on three to five test products for thirty minutes. Watch the start (prices, badges, timer, bar, sale page), then watch the end (prices restored to the exact original values, compare-at cleared, page unpublished). This is when you discover a missed variant, a wrong timezone, or a plan product limit lower than your assortment. If you use overlapping campaigns, rehearse the overlap too: start the lighter campaign, let the deeper one take over, and watch the price step back down when the deeper one ends.

Then run the checkout matrix on the live store with real cart values, and record expected and actual totals:

Freeze rules for the sale window

• No manual price edits on campaign products while a campaign is scheduled or live. If a price must change, change it through the campaign or after the reset.
• No CSV imports touching price columns during the sale window.
• Don't uninstall or reinstall pricing apps mid-campaign.
• One person owns the campaign; everyone else asks before touching prices.

Launch day: one clear deadline

A useful countdown answers a practical question: how long do I have to buy? Set it to the campaign's real end time, and use stock messages only when they reflect actual inventory.

What real urgency looks like in a Shopify storefront:

• Countdown timer on the product page (and the sale collection, if your theme supports it), counting to the actual campaign end. Disco's timer is tied to the campaign schedule, so it can't disagree with the end time; with overlapping campaigns it counts to the end of the one currently setting the price.
• Sale badges on product cards showing the real saving ("Save 30%" or "Save $200"), driven by the compare-at price rather than typed by hand.
• Announcement bar with the headline and the deadline, linking to the collection.
• Inventory-driven scarcity only when it's true. If a hero product is down to its last units, say so; if it isn't, don't.

Keep the deadline prominent and easy to read. One well-placed timer is enough.

Go-live check (the first 15 minutes)

1. Open a headline product in an incognito window: sale price, strikethrough, badge.
2. Open the sale collection: every card shows sale styling; excluded products are absent.
3. Timer shows the correct remaining time; announcement bar links to the right URL.
4. Coming-soon page has been replaced by the sale page (or redirects).
5. Place a test order with no code, then one with your welcome code, and confirm the totals match your codes policy.
6. Send the launch email to yourself and check that prices render as sale prices.
7. Check one product in each market you sell to, if you use Shopify Markets.

When BFCM ends

How to restore regular prices after your Black Friday sale

At the end time, the campaign restores prices and removes the sale elements you enabled. Check the price display, page, timer, badges, announcement bar, and any collection using campaign tags during your rehearsal so you know what to expect after Cyber Monday.

If a lighter campaign is still running when the headline campaign ends (the Cyber Week tail), the price steps down to that campaign's sale price, not to the regular price. That is the design, not a failed reset; the original price returns when the last campaign ends. Tell whoever runs the spot checks which state to expect on which morning.

Spot checks (the morning after a campaign ends)

• Ten products across the three groups: price restored, or stepped down to the tail campaign's price if you scheduled one; headline sale styling removed.
• Every variant on two multi-variant products.
• One product per market.
• Search results and recommended-product blocks show no stale sale styling.
• Product feed has picked up the restored prices.
• Welcome code is active again and the popup copy is back to normal.
• The BFCM URL still resolves. It's in every email you sent, so don't let it 404: keep the collection live with a "sale ended, here's what's next" message, or redirect it to your December offer, and update the navigation link.

Measure the result against your goal

Start with the one metric you chose at the top: revenue against target, contribution after product and shipping costs, units cleared, or new customers and their share of orders. Then the diagnostics: units sold per product group, average order value, discount-code usage during the sale (your stacking leak, in $), support tickets by type, stockouts and when they happened, and anything that went wrong with prices, timers, or syncs.

Then write down three things to change. Keep the tags, the brief, and the test matrix. Next year starts from here, not from a blank page.

BFCM planning template and weekly checklist

Copy both of these into your planning doc. The brief is one row per decision made above; the checklist is the same plan as dated tasks.

Your weekly checklist

T-8 to T-6 weeks

• ☐ Primary goal and target number agreed and written down
• ☐ Products sorted into headline / volume / clearance groups
• ☐ Exclusions decided and tagged
• ☐ Groups organized with tags or collections in Shopify
• ☐ Inventory depth checked for headline products; sell-out plan agreed

T-6 to T-4 weeks

• ☐ Sale shape chosen and T-0 date set; planning calendar shifted to match
• ☐ Headline number chosen
• ☐ Mechanism decided for each offer element (sale price vs. native discount)
• ☐ Dates, times, timezone fixed; Cyber Week tail scheduled or ruled out
• ☐ Reference-price rules checked for your markets
• ☐ Codes policy written

T-4 to T-2 weeks

• ☐ Sale collection created and linked in navigation
• ☐ Coming-soon page and waitlist live
• ☐ Announcement bar scheduled
• ☐ Homepage hero prepared
• ☐ Campaigns built and scheduled (one per group, plus the overlapping early-access or tail campaign if you use one) with start and end times

T-2 weeks to launch

• ☐ Email sequence written and scheduled (launch email timed after go-live)
• ☐ Social and paid assets ready, all pointing to one URL
• ☐ Support macros written
• ☐ Price-writing systems table completed; syncs paused, excluded, or re-timed
• ☐ Feed refresh timing confirmed
• ☐ Dress-rehearsal campaign run and reset verified (including the overlap, if you use one)
• ☐ Checkout test matrix completed on the live store
• ☐ Freeze rules communicated to the team

Launch and during

• ☐ 15-minute go-live check completed
• ☐ Mid-sale email sent; restocks and sell-outs handled
• ☐ Last-call sends timed to the real end

After

• ☐ Reset verified with spot checks
• ☐ Codes and popup restored
• ☐ Landing-page state updated
• ☐ Analysis completed against the primary goal
• ☐ Three changes for next year written down

FAQ

Build the campaign before the traffic arrives

Give yourself a launch day spent checking a finished campaign. Tag the products, agree the offer and the shape of the sale, schedule the start and end, and test the reset while there's still time to change things. Start with the brief above and assign an owner to each task.

Install Disco, create the sale collection, and schedule the start and end well in advance. The free plan is enough to build and test a small campaign today; for larger plans, see our current plans page.

Install Disco from the Shopify App Store →

---

Next: How to schedule a Shopify sale that starts and ends automatically walks through the scheduling and reset this playbook relies on, and Bulk discounts in Shopify: put hundreds of products on sale without CSV covers applying the three discount levels to a large catalog.