Black Friday 2026 falls on Friday, November 27, the day after Thanksgiving, and Cyber Monday on Monday, November 30. If you’re reading this on November 10, you have 17 days. That’s enough to run a profitable sale, as long as you decide fast, run your margin math before you cut prices, and study what your competitors did last year. Here’s the full plan, in order.
Black Friday 2026: the dates that matter
Black Friday stopped being a single day a while ago. Many stores start a “Black Week” on the Monday before, keep going through the weekend and close on Cyber Monday. In practice, your selling window runs from November 23 to November 30, with peaks on Friday and Monday.
| Date | Event | What you do with it |
|---|---|---|
| Wed, Nov 11 | Singles’ Day (11.11) and Veterans Day sales | A live preview: note which brands in your niche already run a promo, and how. |
| Mon, Nov 23 | Common start of Black Week | Deadline for creatives, offer page and emails to be ready. |
| Thu, Nov 26 | Thanksgiving (US) | Early access for your list; many shoppers browse deals on their phones that evening. |
| Fri, Nov 27 | Black Friday | Traffic peak and the most crowded ad auctions of the year: tight budget control. |
| Sat–Sun, Nov 28–29 | Black Friday weekend | Reminders, creative refresh, “last hours” push to non-buyers. |
| Mon, Nov 30 | Cyber Monday | Close the sale or run a second, different offer. |
| December | Holiday season | Switch to gifting and watch your shipping cut-off dates. |
Your prep timeline, even starting on November 10
Ideally, Black Friday prep starts in September. But 17 days is workable if you move in blocks and don’t reopen decisions once they’re made.
Nov 10–13: decide
- Pick the products. Best-sellers, items with enough margin to absorb a discount, and maybe slow stock you want to clear. Not the whole catalog by default.
- Run the margin and ROAS math (below) for every discount level you’re considering. The math sets the discount, not what everyone else is doing.
- Check stock and supplier lead times. If you dropship, get real delivery times for late November now. A Black Friday order that arrives after Christmas means a refund and a bad review.
- Start your competitor research: Meta Ad Library, newsletter sign-ups, a list of brands to track.
Nov 14–20: produce
- Ad creatives: at least three angles, each in two or three formats (static, vertical video, carousel).
- The offer page: a Black Friday collection or landing page with the offer visible above the fold, the terms and the delivery times.
- Your email and SMS sequence, written and scheduled in advance.
- Automatic discounts applied in the cart rather than a code to copy, if your platform supports it.
Nov 21–26: warm up and test
- Tease the sale on social and email with an early-access sign-up. That list will be the most profitable audience of your campaign.
- Open early access to customers and subscribers 24 to 48 hours before everyone else.
- Test the whole funnel: a real order on mobile, discount applied, confirmation email received, shipping fees right.
- Freeze the site: no new apps or theme changes after November 25.
Nov 27–30: run it
On the day, your job is monitoring, not creating: stockouts, cost per purchase hour by hour, tired creatives, support tickets. Write your rules before the 27th (for example: “I kill an ad whose cost per purchase is above my max CPA after $X spent”) and apply them without improvising.
Choosing your offer: formats that work and what they cost you
20% off sitewide isn’t a strategy, it’s a default. The right format depends on your margin, your average order value and what your niche already does.
| Offer | Best for | Margin impact | Trap to avoid |
|---|---|---|---|
| % off a selection | Pushing best-sellers | High on the selected items | Discounting products that already sell well |
| Tiered discount ($10 off $50, $25 off $100) | Raising order value | Controlled if tiers are set right | Tiers so low they change nothing |
| Bundle or “2nd item 50% off” | Complementary or consumable products | Often the best: shipping is shared | A bundle nobody actually wants |
| Free gift over $X | Brands that won’t cut prices | Limited to the gift’s cost | A gift with no perceived value |
| Free shipping | Low-AOV stores, shipping-sensitive buyers | Shipping cost on every order | Making it your only offer when everyone has it |
| VIP early access | Rewarding existing customers | None by itself, it’s a timing lever | Announcing it too late to build the list |
| Time-limited flash deal | Weekend spikes | High, but short | Fake urgency (a countdown that resets) |
Keep your reference prices honest. In the US, the FTC’s guides against deceptive pricing target inflated “was” prices, and if you sell into the EU, the Omnibus rule requires any announced discount to be based on the lowest price you charged in the previous 30 days. Raising prices in early November to show a bigger discount on the 27th is risky, and customers notice.
Work out your margin and break-even ROAS before cutting prices
This is the step most guides skip, and the one that separates a profitable Black Friday from a busy one that loses money. You need two numbers:
- Margin before ads: selling price (excluding sales tax) minus every variable cost of an order (product, shipping, payment fees, packaging).
- Break-even ROAS: the minimum revenue each ad dollar must bring in so you don’t lose money. Formula:
selling price ÷ margin before ads.
A worked example
Say a product sells for $50. It costs you $14, and shipping plus payment fees come to about $6 per order. Variable costs: $20. Margin before ads: $30, or 60% of the price. Break-even ROAS: 50 ÷ 30 = 1.67. As long as each ad dollar brings back more than $1.67 in revenue, the order makes money. Your maximum cost per purchase is $30.
Now apply a discount, with costs unchanged:
| Discount | Price | Margin per order | Break-even ROAS | Sales needed for the same total margin |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| None | $50 | $30 | 1.67 | ×1 |
| 20% | $40 | $20 | 2.00 | ×1.5 |
| 30% | $35 | $15 | 2.33 | ×2 |
| 40% | $30 | $10 | 3.00 | ×3 |
| 50% | $25 | $5 | 5.00 | ×6 |
A 30% discount halves your margin. To earn as much as usual, you need to sell twice the units, and every ad dollar now has to return $2.33 instead of $1.67. At 50% off, you’d need six times the volume at a 5.0 ROAS, during the week when ad auctions are most crowded. That’s why deep discounts on mid-margin products so often end in a loss.
Why bundles protect margin better
Compare a “2nd item 50% off” offer. The customer pays $50 + $25 = $75 for two units. Your costs: 2 × $14 + $6 of shipping and fees (if both ship in one box) = $34. Margin per order: $41. Break-even ROAS: 75 ÷ 41 = 1.83. For the shopper, that’s 25% off per item. For you, it’s $41 of margin per order instead of $15 with a straight 30% discount, because shipping and fees are paid once.
Set a target ROAS, not just a floor
Break-even means you earn nothing. If you want to keep $5 profit per order at 30% off, your max CPA drops to $15 − $5 = $10, and your target ROAS becomes 35 ÷ 10 = 3.5. Factor in returns too: every returned order lowers your real margin and pushes the threshold up.
TrendTrack offers a free break-even ROAS calculator (and a margin calculator) that you can use without a subscription. Rerun the numbers for each discount level before you scale budgets.
How to spy on your competitors’ Black Friday ads
Your competitors already ran your tests last year. Their Black Friday 2025 ads show which offers they pushed, when they started, which formats they used and how many variants they launched. It’s research on public data and it’s legal: you borrow ideas and mechanics, not their visuals or copy, which stay protected.
Step 1: build your competitor list
Pick 5 to 10 brands: three or four direct competitors (same product, same price point), two or three bigger players in your niche that can afford to test a lot, and one or two brands from a nearby niche whose marketing you admire. Note each store URL and the exact Facebook page name. To find who matters in your niche, our guide on how to spy on a Shopify store covers the methods.
Step 2: find last year’s Black Friday ads in the Meta Ad Library
The Meta Ad Library is free. One detail matters a lot here: ads delivered in the European Union must stay in the library for up to a year after they last ran. So late-November 2025 campaigns are still visible, as long as they reached EU users. For ads that only ran in the US, the library shows active ads only, so start saving screenshots now.
- Pick an EU country where your competitors advertise and the “All ads” category.
- Search the brand name, or a keyword like “black friday” to sweep a whole niche.
- Set the status filter to active and inactive, and the impressions date range to November 10 – December 5, 2025.
- Open each ad: start date, copy, visual, landing page and, for the EU, estimated reach.
- Look for ads grouped as multiple versions: a brand rolling out the same creative in batches is testing and spending.
For the full walkthrough of every filter and its limits, see our Meta Ad Library guide.
Step 3: fill in an analysis grid
| What you log | What it tells you |
|---|---|
| Date of the first Black Friday ad | When your niche starts talking (early-November teasing or launch on the day) |
| The exact offer (%, bundle, gift, tiers) | The discount level shoppers will see everywhere |
| Format (static, video, carousel) | What the niche favors, and the gap if everyone does the same |
| Hook in the first 3 seconds or first line | Recurring angles: urgency, gifting, strikethrough price, social proof |
| Number of variants | The offers the brand really bet on |
| Landing page | Product page, dedicated collection or landing page |
| Last day the ad ran | Whether the sale lasted one day, one week or through Cyber Monday |
After ten brands, patterns show up: a “normal” discount level for your niche, a dominant format, a typical timeline. Match the market where you must (the expected offer level) and stand out where everyone looks the same (angle, format, mechanic).
Step 4: watch their emails and SMS too
Create a dedicated inbox today and subscribe to every competitor’s newsletter, plus SMS if you have a spare number. Add a product to the cart and abandon it. By November 27 you’ll have their teasers, early access and send cadence. The limit: you only see what’s sent after you sign up, not last year’s sequence.
Step 5: automate once the list grows
Free methods are fine for three or four brands. Beyond that, or if you want to know who is really spending, they get slow: the Meta library works brand by brand, shows no spend and starts from zero every visit. That’s where TrendTrack adds something concrete:
- Trending Ads: a library of 250M+ ecommerce ads you can filter by niche, format, run time or budget, to find past Black Friday creatives across a whole niche.
- Brand Tracker: follow competitors and get alerted when one launches a new campaign or offer.
- Meta EU/UK data: reach and estimated ad spend per brand, tracked daily, to see who really scales during Black Week.
- Email Tracking: archived email campaigns, so you can read a brand’s past sequence if it’s in the database.
- The free Chrome extension: estimated traffic, apps and access to a store’s Facebook ads, no subscription needed.
On plans: Starter, the most limited plan, tracks only a small number of brands and doesn’t include the ad library, which is thin for Black Friday research. Pro (more tracked brands, Meta, Google and TikTok ad library, EU/UK data, unlimited email tracking) fits this use. Plan details and current prices are on our TrendTrack pricing page, and the MA20 promo code takes 20% off. One limit: TrendTrack’s reach and estimated spend data only covers Meta, and its TikTok coverage is less deep than a specialist tool’s. If your niche lives on TikTok, add TikTok’s Commercial Content Library (EU ads) to your routine.
Promo code MA20: 20% off your TrendTrack subscription
Will TrendTrack run its own Black Friday deal? As we write this, nothing has been announced, and we found no trace of one in 2025. We keep our TrendTrack Black Friday page updated if that changes. If your goal is to prepare your own sale, waiting for a possible discount makes no sense: research is useful now, not in December.
Black Friday creatives: what to prepare
- The offer in the first seconds (or the first line of a static): the percentage, bundle or gift, written big.
- The product clearly visible, not just a black background with gold “BLACK FRIDAY” lettering, which is what everyone else runs.
- A real end date (“ends Monday midnight”) that justifies urgency without faking it.
- Social proof: reviews, customer-shot UGC, order counts if you can back them up.
- Ad-to-page consistency: same offer, visual and price. Any gap kills conversion.
Aim for three angles (best price of the year, the perfect gift for less, the bundle that saves money), each as vertical video and static. Prepare a second batch for the weekend, because creatives burn out fast as frequency climbs. TrendTrack’s free hook generator gives starting points if you’re short on ideas. On audiences, think in two phases: before November 23, ads fill your lists (early-access sign-ups, visitors, engagers); during Black Week, a large share of budget goes to those warm audiences, which convert better while cold acquisition is at its most expensive.
Email and SMS: your Black Friday sequence
| When | Message | Audience |
|---|---|---|
| Nov 16–19 | Teaser + early-access sign-up | Whole list |
| Nov 25 or 26 | Early access opens | Customers and early-access sign-ups |
| Nov 27, morning | Official launch | Whole list |
| Nov 27, evening | Short reminder (SMS or email) | Non-openers and non-buyers |
| Nov 29 | Last hours / weekend best-sellers | Non-buyers |
| Nov 30 | Cyber Monday: extension or new offer | Non-buyers + abandoned carts |
| Early December | Thank-you + gift ideas | Black Friday buyers |
Exclude buyers from reminders about the offer they just used. Don’t blast a list you haven’t emailed in months: ramp up volume from mid-November, and check your sender authentication (SPF, DKIM, DMARC) and one-click unsubscribe, required by Gmail and Yahoo for bulk senders since 2024. SMS needs explicit opt-in consent (in the US, TCPA rules apply), so save it for your two or three most important messages.
Site checklist before the big day
- Mobile load speed checked, unused apps disabled.
- Discounts tested on a real order, reference prices compliant.
- Announcement bar and Black Friday page live, linked from the homepage.
- Delivery times and return policy visible, including holiday cut-off dates.
- Stock levels up to date, with a stockout alert and a replacement product ready.
- Canned replies for support (shipping, returns, code not working).
After Black Friday: Cyber Monday, the holidays and your debrief
Cyber Monday: close or relaunch
Either extend your offer until Monday night with a last-chance message, or run a different offer (a bundle, a gift, another category) to give Friday’s non-buyers a fresh reason to come back. Either way, announce a clear end: a sale that drags into December teaches customers to wait.
December: hand off to the holidays
Your November buyers are ideal targets for a complementary product; non-buyers can come back with a gifting angle rather than a discount. If you’re deciding what to push next, our list of Christmas products to sell can help. Post your order cut-off dates for delivery before December 24, and if you dropship with long lead times, stop promising Christmas delivery early. Gift cards have no shipping problem.
The debrief: what to log for 2027
- Real margin of the operation (after ads, discounts and returns), not just revenue.
- Daily ROAS and cost per purchase against your break-even threshold.
- New versus returning customers: a sale that only reaches existing buyers mostly shifted purchases.
- Best-performing creatives and emails, with screenshots.
- Your competitor grid, to reopen next September.
The most expensive mistakes
- Setting the discount before doing the margin math, then finding out on November 28 that your ROAS is below break-even.
- Inflating prices in early November to fake a bigger discount.
- Copying a competitor’s creatives instead of learning from their mechanics.
- Betting everything on cold ads in the most expensive week of the year while ignoring your email list.
- Promising delivery you can’t keep, especially when dropshipping.
- Not measuring: without a debrief, you start from scratch next year.
Frequently asked questions
When should I start preparing for Black Friday?
Ideally in September for the offer and October for creatives. Black Friday 2026 is November 27, so starting on November 10 leaves 17 days, which is enough if you lock the offer and margin math in the first few days.
How much discount should I offer on Black Friday?
Whatever your margin can carry. Calculate break-even ROAS for each discount level: with a 60% margin before ads, a 30% discount raises it from 1.67 to 2.33. Bundles and gifts often protect margin better than a flat discount.
How can I see my competitors’ Black Friday ads?
Use the Meta Ad Library, pick an EU country, include inactive ads and set the impressions date range to late November of last year. Ads shown in the EU stay visible for up to a year after they last ran; US-only ads are visible only while active.
Is it legal to raise prices before Black Friday?
You can change prices, but advertised discounts must be based on a genuine former price. In the EU that means the lowest price in the previous 30 days, and in the US the FTC targets inflated reference prices.
Should I run a Black Week instead of a single day?
For most stores, yes. Shoppers compare all week and over the weekend. A Monday-to-Cyber-Monday sale with early access for customers spreads both sales and site load.
What is the difference between Black Friday and Cyber Monday?
Black Friday is the Friday after Thanksgiving, November 27 in 2026, and Cyber Monday is the following Monday, November 30. Cyber Monday is often used to extend the offer or launch a second one for non-buyers.