How to plan Black Friday for a Shopify store

A six-week Black Friday plan for a Shopify store: the offer, discount limits, stock and checkout, warming up email volume, pacing the big sends and the clean-up.

What this is for

Black Friday goes wrong in predictable ways for small stores: a discount that does not apply at checkout, a hero product that sells out on Friday morning, or a list that has barely been emailed all year suddenly getting five sends in four days and landing in spam. Almost all of it is avoidable if the work starts in early October instead of the week before.

This guide takes you from choosing the offer to switching it off again. At the end you will have the discounts built and tested in Shopify, stock checked, a sending plan that warms your list up first, and a list of what to undo on Tuesday. The free Black Friday planner is a quick way to lay out the dates as you go.

Time needed and what you need

Time needed: about 6 hours over six weeks. Two hours in early October to set the offer and build discounts, an hour a week on warming up sends and checks, and an hour after Cyber Monday to clean up.

Your product costs and margins, so you know what discount each product can take
Staff access to Shopify discounts, products and inventory
Your Klaviyo account and last year's November campaign results, if you have them
A rough stock count for the ten products you expect to sell most

The steps

Start about six weeks out. Steps 1 to 4 are store work and must be finished before any email mentions the offer.

1. Choose the offer from your margins, not from competitors

For each product you plan to include, write down the price, the cost and what is left per order after the discount, shipping and payment fees. A sitewide percentage is simple but gives the same cut on thin-margin items as on fat ones. Tiered offers (spend more, save more), bundles and a gift with purchase can protect margin while still feeling like an event. Pick one main offer; three competing offers confuse people.

2. Check how you will show the saving

A struck-through price has to be one you really charged. If you sell to customers in the EEA, a Black Friday deal counts as announcing a price reduction, and you have to show the lowest price from the previous 30 days or more. Do not raise prices in October to make November's discount look bigger. The full rules are in the guide to running a sale without training customers to wait. source, checked 28 September 2026

3. Build and test every discount in Shopify early

Create the discounts in Shopify at least two weeks ahead with start and end dates set, and decide which ones may combine. Shopify caps how many automatic discounts can be active and how many codes a customer can stack, so a store that already runs app discounts and loyalty codes can hit the ceiling without noticing. source, checked 28 September 2026

Then test it as a customer would: put the discounted products in a cart, add a code you expect to combine and one you expect to be refused, and check the totals at checkout on a phone.

4. Check stock and what happens when it runs out

For each product you will feature, compare stock to what you sold in your busiest week this year. Shopify only reserves stock once a shopper submits payment, so in a rush two people can reach checkout for the last unit and one of them hits an error. Decide ahead of time whether each product stops selling at zero or takes backorders, and have a substitute ready to feature if the hero product sells out. source, checked 28 September 2026

5. Warm up your sending volume from October

If you normally email a few thousand engaged people a week, do not jump to the whole list five times in one weekend. Gmail's guidelines warn against sudden spikes for senders without a history of large volumes, and give doubling as an example that can go wrong. Through October, send a little more often and widen the audience in steps, starting with people who opened or clicked recently. source, checked 28 September 2026

Watch complaints while you do it. Gmail asks bulk senders to keep the spam rate in Postmaster Tools under 0.3%, and Black Friday week is when unengaged subscribers are most likely to press the spam button. source, checked 28 September 2026

6. Plan the week's emails and who gets each one

A small store rarely needs more than five campaigns across the weekend. Give the biggest sends to engaged subscribers and past buyers, and keep people who have not opened in months to one send at most. Put each campaign in your monthly email calendar as a dated draft with an owner.

Early access for subscribers or past buyers, the evening before
Launch morning: the offer, the products, the end date
Saturday: proof and gift ideas, no new offer
Cyber Monday: the offer again or a second, smaller one
Last chance: only to people who have not bought this weekend

7. Pace the largest sends instead of firing them at once

For the launch send, consider Klaviyo's gradual send instead of a fixed time. It delivers the campaign in batches, which spreads the traffic hitting your store and paces your sending. You set the batch size between 1% and 50% of recipients, every minute or every hour. It cannot be combined with an A/B test, so choose one or the other for that send. source, checked 28 September 2026

8. Get the storefront and ads ready

Prepare the announcement bar, a Black Friday collection with the included products, and the homepage banner, and schedule them rather than editing live on Thursday night. Build any ads in advance and leave them paused until the offer is live, so nobody clicks through to full prices.

9. Switch everything off and review

On Tuesday, check that every discount has ended, banners are gone and compare-at prices are back to normal. Then pull the numbers: orders and revenue by day, which emails drove them, unsubscribes and spam complaints per send, and which products sold out and when. Write down three things to change next year while you still remember them.

A worked example

For a women's activewear brand with 12,000 subscribers
Worked example (an invented brand, with invented numbers)
The brand's leggings sell for $60 and cost $24 to make and ship, leaving $36. A 25% sitewide discount takes $15 off, leaving $21 per pair, which it decides it can afford on leggings but not on its thin-margin accessories, so accessories are left out.
Its usual campaign goes to 4,000 engaged subscribers. In October it widens the audience in steps that never double: 5,000 in the first week, 7,000 in the second, 9,000 in the third and 11,000 at the start of November. By Black Friday the full list of 12,000 is only 1,000 more than its last send.
For the launch it uses a gradual send of 10% of recipients a minute, so the 12,000 emails go out in 10 batches of 1,200 over about 10 minutes instead of all at once.

Common mistakes

Mentioning the offer in an email before the discounts are built and tested. When the code fails at checkout on launch morning, the replies pile up and the first wave of buyers leaves. Build first, test, then write.

Emailing the whole list, including people who have not opened in a year, five times in one weekend. That is the fastest way to raise spam complaints and push later sends out of the inbox. Warm up in October and keep unengaged subscribers to one send.

Forgetting to end the discounts. A Black Friday code still working in mid-December tells customers your full price is optional. Set end dates when you create each discount and check them on Tuesday.

Featuring a product you have fifty of in every email. It sells out on Friday morning and the rest of the weekend's sends point to a sold-out page. Feature products you have depth in, and have a substitute ready.

Doing this with Tilly

Tilly's email calendar agent plans the campaigns around your Black Friday dates, and the plan costs no credits. Each campaign you have it write costs 10 credits and lands in Klaviyo as a draft, so the audience and gradual-send choices above stay with you.

If you use Tilly's ads agent for the weekend, the ads publish to Meta paused. Tilly never turns spend on, which suits the plan of building ads early and switching them on only when the offer is live.

Questions people ask

When should I start planning Black Friday?

Six weeks out is comfortable for a small store: early October for the offer and discounts, the rest of October for warming up sends, and November for content. If you need to order extra stock, start earlier, because supplier lead times are the one thing you cannot rush.

Do I have to discount everything?

No. Many stores discount their core range and leave new arrivals or low-margin items at full price. Say clearly which products are included, both in the emails and on the collection page, so nobody feels misled at checkout.

Is early access for subscribers worth it?

It gives people a reason to join your list in November and rewards the ones already on it. Keep it short, a few hours or the evening before, and make sure the discount really does work for them before it is public.

See this on your own store

Paste your store URL. The first pass takes about a minute and needs no account. Save a card (nothing is charged) and Tilly reads the whole store and works out who buys from you.