Black Friday & Cyber Monday tips: How to get your Shopify store ready for 2026 and boost your sales

For Shopify merchants, Black Friday and Cyber Monday 2026 mean being strategically prepared. It's an opportunity to capitalize on a global shopping phenomenon—with an optimized online store, smart marketing, and a focus on the customer experience.

If you are a retailer and want to use Black Friday to boost this year's pre-Christmas sales, now is the time to get on it. There are a few Black Friday preparations to make as Black Friday 2026 approaches!

We want to help you identify potential pitfalls early, attract visitors, optimise your Black Friday sales in Germany and maximise your sales opportunities this year.

It’s no longer just about marketing and discounts: These days, a technical performance check of your online store before the rush is also part of BFCM preparation.

Here are 23 ways to get your store ready for Black Friday. Are you ready?

When is Black Friday 2026 in Germany?

The official Black Friday 2026 in Germany will take place on Friday, November 27, 2026. Black Friday, the shopping event that originated in the United States and has long since taken Europe by storm, takes place annually on the Friday after Thanksgiving.

This officially marks the start of the Christmas season in e-commerce. A whole weekend full of offers awaits online shoppers, including the popular Cyber Monday deals. If you run an online store, now is the ideal time to start preparing. From fine-tuning your online presence to planning your advertising strategy, with each passing week, the biggest shopping event of the year draws closer and time becomes more valuable.

Cyber Monday 2026: Strategic opportunity for online retailers

Success strategies for retailers:

• Create digital exclusivity: Develop online-only promotions such as flash sales or limited-time offers that are only available through your digital channels.

• Seamless continuity of offers: Don't let your Black Friday promotions end abruptly. Customers often expect discounts to continue or even improve. Consider extending successful Black Friday deals or launching exclusive Cyber Monday promotions.

• Targeted product strategy: Focus your marketing activities on high-traffic categories such as consumer electronics, tech accessories and smart home appliances. These product segments traditionally generate the highest traffic and sales.

• Optimize technical infrastructure: Your online platform and payment systems must be designed to handle peak visitor traffic. Ensure stable website performance and a smooth ordering process. Technical problems or slow loading times lead directly to lost sales due to abandoned shopping carts.

With strategic preparation, Cyber Monday can become a highly profitable online event that makes the most of the end of the busiest shopping period of the year.

May I use the term “Black Friday”?

Until a court ruling in mid-2023, the term “Black Friday” was a protected trademark in Germany, which repeatedly led to legal problems for retailers.

However, they can now breathe a sigh of relief: The Federal Court of Justice (BGH) ruled that “Black Friday” is a generic term that cannot be protected under trademark law. The trademark was officially deleted from the German trademark register in August 2024.

This means that German retailers can now freely and legally use the term “Black Friday” in their advertising and marketing campaigns without fear of warnings. If you also advertise in other countries, it is still advisable to check the respective trademark rights there.

Black Friday & Cyber Monday 2025: Die wichtigsten Fakten für Deutschland

A look at the latest figures and trends shows just how important Black Friday and Cyber Monday are for the German economy. The following forecasts and statistics provide an overview of consumer behavior, sales trends, and the key channels surrounding Black Friday and Cyber Monday.

1. Sales: The HDE forecast total sales of 5.8 billion euros for Black Friday and Cyber Monday 2025—a decline of just under 2% compared to the previous year and thus the first decline since the survey began in 2016. The HDE cites persistently weak consumer sentiment as the reason.

2. Shopping Behavior: Despite the slight decline in sales, more consumers than in the previous year planned to take advantage of the promotional days: 48% intended to hunt for bargains on Black Friday, and over a third on Cyber Monday. According to a PwC survey, the average planned budget was 265 euros per person.

3. Holiday Shopping: Approximately 1.6 billion euros of spending went toward Christmas shopping. 54% of respondents also used Black Friday for gift shopping; on Cyber Monday, the figure was 42%.

4. Mobile shopping: The share of mobile purchases continued to rise—industry estimates project that by 2025, around 73% of all Black Friday purchases will be made via smartphone (2024: around 69%).

5. Channels: The lines between online and offline shopping continue to blur. Brick-and-mortar stores remain an important discovery channel, while marketplaces like Amazon have become the primary channel for comparison shopping and research.

6. Logistics: High order volumes continue to mean potentially longer delivery times, underscoring the importance of a robust logistics system.

Advantages and disadvantages of participating in Black Friday for online retailers.

E-commerce retailers should develop a well-thought-out Black Friday strategy to reap the benefits while minimizing the drawbacks. This includes careful discount planning, ensuring smooth logistics and an effective marketing campaign. We have summarized which advantages retailers can benefit from here and which challenges they will face:

Black Friday trends

Black Friday has evolved in recent years and has long since gone beyond the classic discount campaign. The following trends can be observed here:

Changing the name for a suitable brand identity

Many shops take part in Black Friday, but the campaign day is given a different name that is better aligned with the brand and brand identity. Good examples of this are Miss Pompadour with ‘Better Friday’ or ZOÉ LU with ‘Early Black Friday’. Brands such as Nø Cosmetics, on the other hand, rely on ‘Nø Black Friday’ - we explain what this means in the next section.

IKEA's ‘Buyback Friday’ is a sustainable alternative to the classic Black Friday offers that focus on discounts and bulk purchases. IKEA launched this campaign to promote awareness of sustainability and the responsible use of resources. Instead of offering discounts, IKEA encourages its customers to return used IKEA furniture.

Renouncing Black Friday

Many brands, including the well-known beauty brand Nø Cosmetics, are not participating in Black Friday at all. Nø Cosmetics is even going one step further with its ‘Nø Black Friday’ campaign and is closing both its online shop and brick-and-mortar stores on the campaign days. Customers who visit the online shop on the day are instead shown references to charitable organisations. The brand is thus focussing on charitable causes and following two trends at once.

Social commitment instead of discount campaigns

Are you tired of the constant discount battles and would rather make a statement or support a good cause? You are not alone in this, but you are still in the minority. Only a few companies go down this route. In recent years, however, you can see that a trend is clearly developing.

For example, you can use the traffic to plant a tree for every item purchased or donate a certain amount to a charity organisation. You can also create an additional shop by selling just a handful of products and then donating half of the profits to an organisation.

Latori client Asphaltgold takes this approach every year on Black Friday and wants to use the attention generated by Black Friday for a meaningful cause. Between 2020 and 2024, Asphaltgold ran an anti-racism campaign every year. In 2024, the campaign’s theme was “We all dance the same earth.” For this, three T-shirt designs were created, as well as a design for a cap featuring the slogan “Motivated by Love.” All proceeds from these items were donated. Since 2020, Asphaltgold has been able to donate a total of €65,000 to partner organizations such as the European Network Against Racism Aisbl (ENAR), Doctors Without Borders, and the Foundation Against Racism through its Black Friday initiatives.

Extension of the campaign days

The fact that Black Friday is no longer a single promotional day has become increasingly widespread in recent years. Many shops already organise a Black Weekend (Black Friday to Cyber Monday) or even a Black Week (the Monday before Black Friday to Black Friday/Cyber Monday). However, there are also brands such as ZOÉ LU that extend Black Friday to 2-3 weeks under the motto ‘Early Black Friday’ in order to take the hustle and bustle away from customers. This trend has continued to gain momentum heading into 2026: Many major retailers are now launching their first promotions as early as October, so that the shopping season spans several weeks rather than just one weekend.

Agent-Based AI Shopping: When It’s No Longer Just People Doing the Shopping

Arguably the biggest new trend for Black Friday 2026 is the rapid rise of AI shopping agents. More and more consumers are not only relying on ChatGPT, Gemini, or Perplexity to help with product research, but are also increasingly entrusting them with the actual purchasing decision and the ordering process.

Figures from the 2025 Black Friday season show just how quickly this has developed:

• AI-driven traffic to retail websites rose by about 805% year-over-year on Black Friday 2025.

• Visitors who arrived at a store via an AI service made purchases about 38% more often than visitors from traditional traffic sources.

• According to estimates, AI was already involved in about one in every five to six orders during Cyber Week 2025.

• About 45% of consumers say they can imagine letting an AI agent shop on their behalf—among Gen Z, this figure rises to 54%

For online retailers, this means it’s no longer enough to optimize solely for human visitors and search engines. Product data must also be clearly structured, complete, and trustworthy for AI agents so that they can actually find, understand, and recommend your products. Learn more about this in the new Tip 20 further down in the article.

Priority for mobile and social-first strategies

Mobile devices and social platforms have established themselves as the most important shopping channels. Current industry estimates for the 2025 holiday season project that approximately 73% of all online purchases on Black Friday were made via smartphone—a further increase from about 69% the previous year. This makes seamless mobile checkout processes and integrated payment solutions like Apple Pay absolutely crucial. Social selling has also gained significant importance: platforms like TikTok and Instagram are transforming into direct sales environments through interactive product features and live shopping events.

Tech & Performance Check: Get Rid of Unnecessary Ballast Before the Rush

Most e-commerce platforms and cloud systems, such as Shopify, scale seamlessly during traffic spikes. The real bottlenecks, however, are untested app scripts, outdated themes, and slow third-party widgets. Conduct a technical audit before the busy season begins:

• Clean up old apps: Uninstall Shopify apps you no longer actively use. Be sure to completely remove any code snippets left behind in the theme (e.g., orphaned JavaScripts).

• Test checkout and payment: Walk through the entire ordering process on all mobile devices and with all available payment methods (Shop Pay, PayPal, BNPL) in test mode to identify faulty discount logic early on.

• Optimize mobile load times: Compress banner graphics and product images into the WebP format to minimize load times for your main BFCM collection page.

23 Black Friday tips in e-commerce: what should you prepare for the Black Friday Sale 2026?

We've created a 23-point Black Friday guide for you to make sure you don't forget anything in your Shopify Black Friday preparation this year. If you are a Shopify merchant, you don't need to worry about the most important things already: you don't need to move Shopify to a new version, you don't need to install any updates and the expected traffic peaks will be cushioned for you by the cloud system. Time to take care of the other things:

1. Make sure that storage, processing and support are ready

Imagine your sales and marketing strategies going so well that your sales explode. If you're unprepared, it can lead to empty warehouses, delivery bottlenecks and angry customers. So make sure your back-office processes are up to scratch. You need the necessary infrastructure to process all sales in a timely manner. Make sure your processes in warehousing, order processing, customer support and returns are robust enough to handle all orders.

2. Analyse and improve your shop's user journey

The best way to find out how visitors move around your website, what they click on, where they get stuck or why they leave the page without making a purchase is to look over their shoulder. There are certain softwares and apps that record visitors and create heatmaps of your website. This gives you a lot of valuable data and allows you to make changes in preparation for Black Friday to ensure that the user journey is fluid until the purchase is completed. Apps such as Lucky Orange Heatmap & Replays, Saviour - Heatmaps & Replay or Replay Site Recorder & Surveys help with this.

3. Prepare landing pages, images and other creative elements

The competition is immense, especially on Black Friday weekend. So what to do to stand out? Depending on your target group, it might be worth adapting your advertising images to hypes and current trends. Turn your ad into a meme, photoshop your products into the squid-game setting or pick up on a viral TikTok trend and make your own video featuring your products. Be anything but boring!

If you only want to offer certain products or categories on the weekend, it can be worthwhile to create an additional landing page to convert customers in the funnel more quickly.

You should already start building up your email distribution lists and acquire new followers on Facebook, Instagram and TikTok in order to play these "warm" contacts with retargeting ads on Black Friday.

4. Optimise the average order value

If prospects are willing to spend money and shop in your shop on the sales weekend anyway, you should use this commitment to boost the average order value. We have already described how you can do this in an additional blog post: 13 ways to increase the average order value.

5. Plan your sales and discounts

Plan your Black Friday and Cyber Monday sales in detail and ask yourself some important questions for this: Do you want to use the whole weekend for discounting? Will the offers change over the course of the weekend? Do you want to promote certain products at certain times? Do you need separate countdowns for these products? Do you have an offer to start the sale and draw as many people into the shop as possible?

Don't forget the power of up-sell and cross-sell. A customer has bought a scarf? Maybe he also wants the gloves with the same pattern! You can find numerous apps for this as well.

6. Create a wish list

Set up a wish list in your online shop in the run-up to the Black Friday-Cyber Monday weekend. This way, customers can save products for later if they're not ready to buy yet. They can also share the list with friends and family on social channels - free marketing and maybe even more customers!

7. Set up abandonment emails and use discount codes.

If you don't have an email automation for abandoned carts yet, now is a good time to set one up. Shopify already offers this option in your backend, by the way, but service providers like Klaviyo also make it possible through automated Klaviyo flows. If a prospective customer has placed products in his shopping cart but aborts the purchase process in the meantime, he will have an email in his inbox a short time later with his forgotten products in the shopping cart. If you mean particularly well with him, you can attach a discount code in this email. However, this should remain a BFCM measure, otherwise word of the extra discount will spread quickly and future buyers will take advantage of this good nature.

8. Be quick about it! Convey a sense of urgency!

Create a sense of urgency around your sale in your ad copy and on your website. Limited stock or an imminent end to the sale will help make your visitors more likely to click on the 'add to cart' call-to-action. Try including a countdown timer on your product page that shows how many minutes shoppers have left to qualify for next-day delivery. Remember that Black Friday purchases are often impulse purchases. A little persuasion helps to get these items into the basket and to the checkout.

Also, a countdown showing how many products have already been sold can increase the urge to want to check out faster.

9. Build customer trust

Adding customer reviews and real customer photos of the product to your website helps reassure potential customers that you are a reputable brand. So take care of getting new reviews for your website now at the latest.

Including trusted payment methods such as PayPal and major credit cards also adds to the sense of security. A well-written "About Us" page (which, by the way, experience shows are often clicked!) provide the finishing touches in terms of trust.

If you sell products that require explanation, you should also prepare an FAQ page or add questions (and answers) to your existing FAQ page that have often been asked by customers recently.

10. Sell bundles that are only available at BFCM

Provisional bundles of different products are a great way to highlight items you want your customers to focus on when they are looking for a bargain. Such bundles are also suitable for combining store-bought items with top sellers, as many people shop for gifts on Black Friday and are willing to buy the bundle of top product and rather uninteresting item - the gift recipient might like it anyway, after all.

You can create temporary collections for such bundles or special BFCM products.

11. Optimise the check-out

The path to your check-out is most important for the profit of your business. You have worked hard to attract customers, but if they leave your website without making a purchase, all your efforts have been in vain. The success of your e-commerce shop depends primarily on how many sales are made, not on how many users visit your shop.

If you manage to increase the completion rate at the checkout by even five or ten percent, you can significantly increase the overall sales of your shop. Make your check-out as simple as possible.

12. Track your performance

If you've followed our advice in this article and our tips for maximising average order value, you should be well on your way to a great Black Friday weekend. However, it's important to track your metrics via Google Analytics and the stats from your shop and any other channels you use, such as Facebook or Instagram. This is the only way you can understand how your performance was, what went well and what you can improve next year.

13. Black Friday Marketing and Advertising

Marketing efforts are critical to getting the most out of Black Friday. Here are some effective strategies retailers can implement for this shopping event:

• Email marketing: send a series of emails to prepare your customers for upcoming deals. Use countdowns and teasers to build anticipation.

• Social media: create teasers and countdowns on your social media platforms. Use hashtags like #BlackFriday and #CyberMonday to increase visibility.

• Influencer marketing: work with influencers to promote your offers. They can help you reach a larger audience.

• Paid advertising: run targeted ads on platforms like Google Ads and Facebook to attract new customers. Use remarketing ads to bring back existing customers.

• SEO optimization: make sure your website is optimized for relevant keywords related to Black Friday. This will improve your visibility in search results.

• Content marketing: Create informative blog posts, videos or infographics that highlight your Black Friday deals. This not only helps with SEO, but also shows your expertise.

• Landing pages: create dedicated landing pages for your Black Friday offers. These pages should be clearly structured and easy to navigate.

• Customer acquisition: offer special incentives for new customer registration, such as exclusive discounts for first-time customers.

• Social Proof: Use customer reviews and ratings to build trust and reinforce the credibility of your offerings.

• Real-time updates: Keep your customers informed about ongoing offers and remaining stock during the Black Friday event.

These actions can be customized and combined to create a tailored Black Friday marketing strategy. It's important to understand your target audience and select those tactics that best fit your business. You should also start thinking about your measures early on and implement them in a timely manner.

14. Offer exclusive deals for regular customers

Reward your loyal customers by giving them early access to Black Friday offers or offering special discounts for regular customers only. Use customer loyalty programmes or newsletters to target this customer group. This increases the likelihood that they will take advantage of your offers and not switch to other shops during Black Friday.

15. Extend the Black Friday sale

Many customers want to make their purchases before or after Black Friday itself. Take advantage of this by launching your offers a few days before the event or extending them to Cyber Monday and beyond. This reduces the pressure on your infrastructure on Black Friday itself and gives customers more time to decide to buy. At the same time, you can generate more sales.

Latori customer Neuland did the same last year and extended the Black Friday sale to a whole weekend.

16. Optimise for mobile devices

More and more customers are shopping on their smartphones, especially during the busy Black Friday sales. Make sure your website is mobile-friendly by ensuring fast loading times, easy navigation and clear, customisable call-to-actions. A responsive design ensures that your website is displayed optimally on all devices. Use Google Mobile-Friendly Test or similar tools to make sure your mobile version doesn't create barriers to conversions.

In addition, you can also consider offering a dedicated app or a Progressive Web App (PWA) for your business. Apps offer a seamless and personalised shopping experience, and customers who already have your app installed on their smartphone can browse through your range quickly and conveniently.

17. Offer free shipping

Free shipping can often be the deciding factor that persuades a customer to make a purchase. Consider offering free shipping, either for all orders or above a certain minimum order value. Communicate this offer clearly on the website and in the checkout process to motivate customers to buy more to reach the threshold.

18. Create a ‘Coming Soon’ pop-up or banner

Increase the anticipation of your Black Friday offers by setting up a pop-up or banner that indicates upcoming discounts. Let customers enter their email address to receive exclusive advance information or offer a newsletter that reminds them of the sale in good time. This will help you build a mailing list for targeted email marketing campaigns while keeping customers interested.

19. A/B testing of offers and discounts

Use A/B testing to find out which offers are best received by your customers. Test different discount levels, such as 10 % vs. 20 %, or different product bundles and analyse the results. The same applies to the placement of call-to-action buttons: Check whether a prominent ‘Buy now’ button on the homepage or directly next to the product descriptions brings in more conversions. These tests will maximise your sales figures and optimise your conversion rate.

20. Optimize Your Product Data for AI Shopping Agents

As described in the “Trends” section, more and more customers are researching and shopping via AI assistants such as ChatGPT, Gemini, or Perplexity, rather than searching and clicking on their own. To ensure that these agents can actually find, correctly understand, and recommend your products, you should:

• Write product descriptions that are clear, complete, and include specific details (material, dimensions, compatibility, etc.), rather than relying solely on promotional language.

• Maintain structured data (Schema.org / Product Markup) for prices, availability, and reviews so that AI systems can reliably extract this information

• Keep inventory levels and prices up to date in real time—AI agents are increasingly comparing across multiple stores and prefer sources with reliable data.

• Answer frequently asked questions (FAQs) in the way a customer would actually phrase them—this increases the chance of being cited in AI-generated responses.

21. Offer Buy Now, Pay Later (BNPL)

Installment payment and “buy now, pay later” solutions like Klarna or Shop Pay Installments continue to gain prominence around Black Friday and Cyber Monday, especially among price-sensitive shoppers during economically challenging times. By prominently displaying BNPL options at checkout, you lower the barrier to larger shopping carts and can thereby increase both the conversion rate and the average order value.

22. Turn one-time buyers into loyal repeat customers (post-BFCM retention)

Customer acquisition costs (CAC) during the Black Friday weekend are higher than ever before. The event only becomes profitable when you turn new customers into repeat buyers. Set up automated follow-up sequences in Klaviyo or your email marketing software:

• After delivery, send targeted care tips, unboxing guides, or tutorials for the purchased product, rather than immediately promoting the next sale.

• Offer first-time buyers an exclusive loyalty discount or double bonus points in your loyalty program for their next purchase in January.

23. Plan for returns management and after-sales logistics

A successful Black Friday weekend inevitably leads to a surge in returns in December and January. Without clear processes, this can completely eat into your margins.

• Strategically extend return windows: Offer an extended return policy through mid-January. This takes the pressure off buyers and reduces spontaneous returns right after the holidays.

• Use a self-service returns portal: Automate the returns process (e.g., via apps like Loop Returns or Stocky), and offer your customers incentives such as gift cards or exchanges instead of just refunds.

Online traders beware - warnings are imminent!

European Price Indication Regulation

Since 28 May 2022, online retailers must comply with the current Price Indication Regulation. This states that every online shop must clearly label discounted products with the lowest price in the last 30 days. This is intended to offer European consumers more transparency and guarantee protection against fake discounts.

Our developers in the Latori team have programmed a Shopify app specifically for this purpose, which you can download from the Shopify App Store!

DOWNLOAD LATORI BEST PRICE INDICATOR NOW

Conclusion

We hope that our Black Friday tips will help you to significantly increase traffic, leads and sales on these promotional days. Whether it's Black Friday, Cyber Monday, or the entire Black Week, use this year-end sales booster to get your Black Friday sales out there! If this is your first Black Friday, treat it as a learning experience for now. Stay motivated and ambitious, set realistic goals and remember not to lose the joy of it.