How to Prepare Your Shopify Store for Black Friday 2026

Start Preparing Early and Define Success

Believe it or not, Black Friday preparation has already started for us and our clients at Barbs Media. Every year, brands put an incredible amount of effort into Black Friday. Many brands literally spend hundreds of hours across all channels designing emails, ads, and planning campaigns, all at at least 10x the volume.

But the brands that consistently have their best Black Friday aren't just executing better during the sale. They're usually preparing months in advance. So, if I were sitting down with a client today and we wanted to make this their biggest Black Friday yet, here's exactly what we'd start working on.

Before we build a single email or launch a single ad, I want everyone on the team answering the same two questions. Number one, what does success actually look like? And two, how are we going to get there? Because every one of those goals leads to a different strategy.

If, for example, our goal is to generate a million dollars in sales, we need to break it down into pieces. Some things to consider would be: How much will we need to spend on ads to acquire new traffic? How many email campaigns will we need to send relative to previous years? And most importantly, how much should we discount our products without cheapening our brand?

Once we can figure out these fundamentals, we can start diving into the offers.

Finalize an Offer That Makes Financial Sense

Once everyone knows the goal, the next step is deciding what we're going to offer to our audience. This is the foundation for everything that comes next. Your emails, ads, social, and landing pages all depend on it. Even your customer support team needs to know exactly what's happening.

Whether it's sitewide savings, bundles, gifts with purchase, or VIP access, we need to make that decision early so every team can start building around it.

However, before you lock anything in, you have to make sure the numbers actually work. Black Friday can drive a ton of revenue, but revenue doesn't automatically mean profit. Don't try and compete with all the other crazy loss leaders out there in your industry if it doesn't actually make financial sense for you.

Every offer has a cost. A sitewide discount might be great for customers, but if your margins are already tight, it could end up being the wrong decision for you. Sometimes a bundle, gift with purchase, or other tiered offers give customers a compelling reason to buy while still protecting more of your margin.

Once you've landed on an offer that makes financial sense, every team can start building around it, knowing the strategy isn't going to change halfway through the project.

Identify Your Biggest Opportunities

One thing I've noticed after looking at hundreds of Shopify stores is that a lot of brands don't actually know where their biggest opportunities are heading into Black Friday. This is super important. You need to know where your brand stands before the sale itself in order to make the right changes.

A lot of brands know they want to improve, but they're not actually sure what to prioritize. That's exactly why my team and I built the LTV scanner. It helps identify those opportunities before you start planning everything else, so you're focused on improving the important parts of your business that will actually have the biggest impact during the holiday season.

You can check it out at scan.barbsmedia.com. I'm going to talk about it more at the end of this video, but it's something I'd recommend doing before you start building your Black Friday strategy.

Align Every Team With One Marketing Calendar

Once the offer is finalized, it's time to get the entire brand aligned. One mistake I see often is every marketing channel operating independently. The email team has one plan, paid ads have another, and social media is creating content without knowing exactly what everyone else is doing.

The thing is, your customers don't see those as separate channels. They just see your brand. So everything needs to feel connected. The messaging in your ads should match exactly what people see on your website. Your email should reinforce that same promotion your social team is talking about. And even customer support, like I mentioned earlier, should know exactly what's launching and when.

This is why I always recommend building one master marketing calendar. It gives every team visibility into what's happening, when the campaigns are launching, and what needs to be ready. Of course, it also helps avoid last-minute surprises—which will happen—duplicated work, and conflicting messaging.

The smoother your team works together behind the scenes, the more seamless Black Friday feels for your customers.

Plan Your Campaign Cadence

Once the strategy's in place and everyone is aligned, we can start building. This is where most of the work actually happens. This is where you'll be designing your email campaigns, creating ad creatives, updating your website, building landing pages, writing SMS campaigns, scheduling content, and whatever else you'll need during the sale.

Here's a classic cadence of what may or may not transpire for most brands. A lot of brands will tease the event two weeks early with an early access signup. A week later, they'll give the same or better offer one week early to early access recipients. Then they'll send a countdown email a few days early.

Next, it'll be three emails on Friday, two emails on Saturday, two emails on Sunday, three on Monday, and maybe three or four SMS sprinkled throughout the week.

That said, there's no single right way to do this, and there's a ton of variations you can have. Some brands start teasing the sale a month in advance. Many don't even bother using an early access list at all. And some brands actually launch their Black Friday offers weeks before the sale itself, some spanning the whole month, too.

The important thing is deciding on that strategy early so every other part of your marketing can support it. I can't stress that point enough.

Build Early and Leave Time for Review

At this point, everyone knows the plan, so it's time to start building. Personally, I don't really like leaving anything until the last minute. I'd rather have every email, SMS, ad, landing page, and website update built well before Black Friday. Not because I expect everything to be perfect the first time, but because it never is.

When you give yourself a few extra weeks, you have time to review everything with your team, make changes, catch mistakes, and improve the campaign before it goes live. It's a much better plan than trying to finish everything the week before, which a lot of brands do.

Align Your Flows and Welcome Offers

I realize we talked a lot about campaigns here, but something that's arguably even more important than the campaigns we send out, at least on the email side, is the flows, the automations. Remember, it's the whole ecosystem that needs to be aligned. This includes email flows and pop-ups.

The next thing I'd look at is every automation that's going to be running during Black Friday. It's easy to spend all your time planning campaigns and forget that, for example, your welcome flow, your abandonment flows, and post-purchase emails are still working in the background.

At this point, we need to rebuild everything. We need to rebuild every abandonment flow, welcome series, and post-purchase flow. Maybe VIP flows need an extra look. Make sure every offer is aligned in these and the messaging remains clear.

These flows should feel like they're part of the same campaign. If someone signs up during Black Friday, they shouldn't be receiving messaging that feels like it was written in the middle of July.

Something that's super important here: do not forget to turn off your standard welcome offers. You do not want to be offering your year-round 10% off in your welcome email when, during that week, everything on your site says 25% off.

They're not aligned. It doesn't make sense. They will cause you customer service headaches, and more importantly, they might even make your customers double-dip on discounting.

Your email flows are the backbone of this operation. I can't stress enough how much these need to be aligned with everything.

Grow Your List With Qualified Subscribers

Again, one mistake I see is brands acting like Black Friday starts in November. But honestly, the months leading up to it are just as important. Every subscriber you add between now and then is another person you'll be able to market to during the biggest sales event of the year.

That's not to say you should be trying to get every subscriber possible. They need to be qualified subscribers because your list is still important. The health of your list is still important.

But you should still be investing in list growth, improving your pop-up, and making sure you're bringing new quality leads into the ecosystem well before waiting for the sale to begin.

Review Everything One More Time

The last thing I do is go through everything one more time. Every campaign, flow, pop-up

Leave Time to Test and Improve

Not because I expect everything to be broken, but because Black Friday isn't really the time you want to find out. The biggest advantage of starting early isn't that you'll finish early; it's that you'll have time to improve everything. You'll have time to catch mistakes, test different ideas, get feedback from your team, and make changes, ideally well before Black Friday arrives. That almost always leads to better results than trying to build everything under a tight deadline.

By the time November rolls around, your focus should be on executing the plan, not scrambling to finish it. Once the sale starts, I'd much rather spend my time looking at performance and making adjustments rather than fixing things that could have been caught way beforehand.

Black Friday Success Takes Months of Preparation

I hope that all makes sense. If there's one thing to take away here, I want you to remember that Black Friday isn't won by sending a few great emails or campaigns. It's the result of months and months of planning, alignment, and execution.

When your offer makes financial sense, your entire team is working from the same plan, your campaigns are built ahead of time, and you've spent the last few months growing your audience, you're putting yourself in the best position possible to have a successful Black Friday.

Find Retention Gaps with the LTV Scanner

Now, chances are there are still a few areas of your business that could be improved before the holiday season. Whether it's your pop-up, your flows, your customer journey, or simply getting customers to come back and buy again, the next few months are your opportunity to fix those gaps before your busiest sales period of the year.

That's exactly why we built a free tool called the LTV Scanner. It scans your store's retention strategy, identifies opportunities to increase customer lifetime value, and will give you a clear idea of what you should be prioritizing before Black Friday arrives. That way, you're spending the next few months improving the areas that will have the biggest impact when traffic and demand start to ramp up.

You can try it completely free at scan.bsmedia.com. All you have to do is input your website domain, and the tool will start working. It works best with Shopify stores. I'll leave the link in the description below.

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