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6 simple ways to sell more on Shopify this Black Friday and Cyber Monday

· 3 min read

Christmas might be the most wonderful time of the year, but for online retailers the real excitement starts a few weeks earlier. The last weekend of November has become the biggest event in the e-commerce calendar.

This year, the dates to remember are:

  • Black Friday — Friday 27 November 2026
  • Cyber Monday — Monday 30 November 2026

Together they make the BFCM weekend: four days when shoppers are actively hunting for deals. But demand alone isn’t enough — every other store is shouting about discounts too. Here are six ways to stand out and turn that traffic into sales.

1. Make your offer worth getting excited about

“10% off everything” is easy to set up and just as easy to ignore. Shoppers have seen it all before, so give them a reason to pick you:

  • Bundles and “buy X, get Y” offers — great for moving more stock and raising your average order value. Shopify’s built-in discounts handle these without extra apps.
  • A free gift over a spend threshold — often feels more generous than a percentage off, and protects your margins.
  • Early access for your email list — rewards your best customers and gets sales in before the rush.

If your offer needs logic the standard discounts can’t handle — tiered pricing, discounts for certain customer groups, complex bundles — Shopify Functions let a developer build exactly the discount you want.

2. Design for the phone first

Most BFCM browsing happens on phones — on the sofa, on the commute, in the queue for coffee. Before the big weekend, go through your store on your own phone as if you were a customer:

  • Can you see the offer without scrolling?
  • Are buttons easy to tap and is the text easy to read?
  • Does the cart drawer or cart page work smoothly?
  • Is checkout quick? Make sure express options like Shop Pay, Apple Pay and Google Pay are switched on — they save shoppers from typing in their details.

3. Make it fast

BFCM is all about urgency. Shoppers have a dozen tabs open with competing deals, and a slow page is the easiest one to close.

The biggest culprits are usually oversized images, leftover code from old apps and too many third-party scripts. I’ve covered how to fix them in 5 quick wins to speed up your Shopify store. Do this in October, not the week before.

4. Get your SEO ready early

Google needs time to find and rank new pages, so build your sale pages well ahead of the weekend:

  • Create one evergreen sale page — something like /collections/black-friday — and reuse it every year. It keeps the links and ranking it has built up, instead of starting from zero each November.
  • Add gift guides. Lots of shoppers use BFCM to start their Christmas shopping. Collections like “Gifts for him” or “Gifts under £50” match what people actually search for.
  • Freshen up product titles and descriptions with the seasonal words your customers use, without stuffing them in.

5. Start early and finish late

The weekend itself matters less than the deals. Shoppers start researching gifts and comparing prices weeks before Black Friday, and many keep looking well into December.

Warm people up in early November with teasers and early access for subscribers, then keep selected offers running after Cyber Monday for those who missed out — or who got sold out elsewhere.

6. Freeze your code — and get help early

Shopify’s servers are built to handle the BFCM rush. The bigger risk is your own store: a theme change or a new app installed the week before can break something right when it matters most.

  • Finish theme work and app installs by early November, then freeze big changes until December.
  • Build your sale design on a duplicate theme, preview it properly, and publish it when the sale starts.
  • Test the whole journey — product page, cart, discount code, checkout — on desktop and mobile before you go live.

If you don’t have the time or the technical skills to do all of this yourself, bring in a Shopify developer early. October is the time to book help; the week before Black Friday is not.

Want to know what to fix first? I’ll take a look at your store for free and send you a short video with your top five quick wins before the big weekend.