The checklist at a glance (more detail on each below):
- Get site search synonyms loaded and working
- Redirect legacy URLs
- Keep the page active all year
- Don’t just build a single BF product collection/category
- Extend your returns windows (where possible)
- Conversion hack – Add an ‘Easter egg’ to your free delivery threshold
- Check your relevant discount codes work
- Pull discount codes that are excluded from your BF period
- Check discount codes can’t be stacked unintentionally
- Build bundles to make it easier for customers to buy multiple items with fewer clicks
- Load in highly relevant and easy upsells to boost margin
- Disable hyper-intensive resources that could slow down your website during exceptionally busy periods
- If you can, enable Amex
- Top up your tools
Site search redirect
Way too many brands make this mistake and lots of customers are left frustrated and confused every year. Redirect key queries like “Black Friday” to an appropriate landing page.
Big players neglect this simple yet massively helpful piece of UX constantly: redirecting campaign terms to the necessary landing page or category that’s the best fit.
Euronics is a classic example of what happens when you fail to configure your site search to understand what Black Friday means.
Naturally, their site search isn’t aware of any products that contain the text “Black Friday”, so it looks at synonyms that are a possible fit and suggests “black fridge” as an alternative query.
As a result of the site search having zero context, it serves up a black integrated oven as the first result, which is unlikely to be of any relevance to their overall BF campaign.
Site search synonyms
Why stop at just redirecting Black Friday? Set up redirects (assuming your site search data shows volume) for other relevant terms such as:
- Cyber Monday
- BF (seriously, this was massive for one retailer I worked with last year – an anomaly for many but highlights the need to scrutinise your own search data)
- Black Monday
This helps your site search to understand that these queries are similar to “Black Friday” rather than serving largely irrelevant results.
Redirect legacy Black Friday URLs
Many retailers use a different URL each year for their Black Friday campaigns, which creates a lot of bloat and negatively impacts your SEO.
It also hurts UX by sending traffic to categories that are no longer relevant or have gone entirely (like this example here at The Perfume Shop).
Have one URL that you recycle every year yourdomain.com/black-friday and redirect any old categories and landing pages to your parent URL if there’s no direct replacement for them.
Lastly, avoid adding the year into the URL (/black-friday-deals-2026) as that further exaggerates the above issues.
Keep your main Black Friday URL active all year
Once your event is over, you should keep it active and do so all year round. Of course, instead of displaying offers or products that are no longer relevant, you lead with a lead magnet and a chance for potential customers to subscribe to your list for dibs on:
- Next year’s deals
- When your next promotional event goes live
That way your key BF page is putting the work in all year round instead of just through the month of November.
It’s also a winner for SEO too as rather than having to wait for search engines (and LLMs) to take note of your newly revived page, it’s accessible all year round making it, in theory, faster to update indices compared to an all-new URL or one that’s previously sat behind a 302/301 redirect for the best part of a year.
Don’t just build a single BF product collection/category
Sorry, Perfume Shop (you’re catching some real constructive criticism in this post – clients usually pay for detail like this!), but it’s for the greater good, I promise.
A single product category to drop your entire Black Friday inventory into is a sure-fire way to turn away paying customers, hurt your conversion rate and dilute your average order value.
The Perfume Shop is a specialist retailer of fragrance, so its shopping experience online needs to align with that – currently it’s seriously lacking here.
At the time of writing, this year’s BF campaign is a single category URL containing over 180 individual products on promotion. That’s a nightmare for customers to browse, particularly when fragrance is so personal and subjective.
There’s a small handful of filters spanning brand, price, product type (practically zero value), range and rating.
To be fair to them, they do have a small handful of subcategories that slice up the parent by price point (under £25, under £50 etc.) but it’s not enough to make shopping easy for customers.
TPS know how their customers shop; they have years of data, and in-store teams likely have a wealth of knowledge here. I’d expect to see subcategories allowing me to shop by:
- Gender (his, hers, unisex)
- Top notes and base notes
- Format (EDT, parfum etc.)
I’d also expect a landing page to merchandise their Black Friday promotions and offers. That offers a much more helpful and approachable way for customers to browse for deals instead of a single pool of 180+ SKUs.
Extend your returns windows (where possible)
It’s no secret that many of us shop BF deals as early Christmas presents. If you’re able to, extend returns windows into the new year to give shoppers confidence that, should anything be an issue, they’re covered until after Christmas.
Don’t just change it in your systems either – make it part of your marketing and shout about the change to give customers more confidence when shopping.
Conversion hack: Add an ‘Easter Egg’ to your free delivery threshold
If you have a free delivery threshold set at, for example, £100, make it £98 in the backend so customers think they’ve ‘beat the system’ when they’re a few £ under.
It will reduce your abandonment and improve conversion; with CPMs on ads being at an all-time high, losing a pound or so on the sale is much less costly than losing the entire £90-something sale in most cases. Particularly after you’ve potentially paid for the click to get them to your site in the first place.
Check your relevant discount codes work
This is an obvious one, but often these macro issues compound and can ruin an otherwise well-executed BF campaign. You’ll be amazed how often clients build codes that end up with typos in the emails/SMS or the code itself.
So be sure to check that they work and are applying the right discounts to the item(s) and categories that customers expect.
Bonus tip: If you’re running a discount code such as ‘BLACKFRIDAY’, I highly recommend also adding a duplicate of the code with the space included (so it reads ‘BLACK FRIDAY’).
Autocorrect is a pain in the arse, so your small convenience addition now can save a customer the frustration at the checkout and potentially the loss of an otherwise “I’m buying this now” customer.
Pull discount codes that are excluded from your BF period
On the flip side, I’ve also seen retailers haemorrhage and burn margin because customers were stacking codes at the checkout and getting discounts beyond what the retailer anticipated. A few ideas:
- Pause affiliate discount codes during your campaign window
- Prevent sale items from being eligible for an additional BF discount
- Prevent customers from being able to stack discount codes on top of one another
- Limit multiples of the same items being purchased in one transaction
If you’re in a margin-rich market and the above doesn’t concern you, great news! But the reality for many retailers is that margins are tight, ads are expensive, and authorising more discount than anticipated could turn an otherwise profitable Black Friday campaign into the opposite due to margin erosion.
Build bundles to make it easier for customers and to ramp up average order value
If you sell TV remotes, include a bundle with the batteries.
If you sell skincare, include a bundle with a travel toiletry bag.
If you sell engine oil (tough market right now), make it easy for customers to buy a filler funnel, the accompanying filters and an oil-safe container to catch the waste oil in.
Not only does the above almost always improve your AoV by a significant factor, but fulfilment costs are high and many carriers charge additional fees/supplements during this busy period to help them cope with demand.
Reducing the number of labels, consumables, postage etc. to sell your inventory is a massive cost-saver and profit booster, and for many marketers, it’s one metric that’s easy to forget about.
Last positive point to make – it makes it significantly easier for customers to reach your free delivery thresholds and do so with fewer clicks on ‘add to basket’ CTAs.
Load in highly relevant and easy upsells to boost margin
Taking this a step further, upselling through the purchase funnel is another great way to bump up average order value and combat the margin you’re sacrificing through Black Friday.
The mistake many retailers make here is making the add-ons too expensive, which requires the customer to think too hard and potentially leave the checkout flow to investigate/consider their options.
You only want to have high-value, super-useful and low-cost add-ons here.
To use another example, if you sell luxury loose-leaf tea, allow customers to add a £2 tea strainer to their order.
They may already have one in their kitchen drawer, but a £2 fee for the convenience of being sure is an easy ‘yes’ for a customer, and they never look up from their phone or leave the checkout.
If you sell flowers, allowing the customer to add another few sachets of flower food for £2 is another easy ‘yes’ at the checkout. Not only are they often branded, but your customer gets to keep their flowers thriving and healthy for longer too.
Disable hyper-intensive resources that could slow down your website during exceptionally busy periods
Think auto-loading videos, heat map scripts, A/B testing platforms not currently running A/B tests, that Mouseflow script you’re running without an active licence…
They all add weight and during the potentially busiest period of the year, you cannot afford to:
- Cause your website to stall/go dark or offline
- Make it painfully slow for customers ready to buy from you
So any last-minute tools that can be disabled for the BF weekend at least, should be culled to help your servers handle the load.
If you can, enable Amex
I know – a controversial one here. I get it, Amex carries higher fees than, say, Mastercard or Visa, but Amex users have much greater spending power than the other card issuers.
According to Sebastian Fernandez (Director at P&G), the average revenue is estimated to be:
- $10 revenue per card for Mastercard
- $472 per card for Amex
That’s 47x the spending power.
Top up your tools
A trivial one, but if critical tools go down, your campaign grinds to a halt. Think:
- Top up the credits for your postcode lookups at the checkout
- Make sure the card on your CDN is still in date and valid (a client learnt this the hard way).
Again, small and simple things that are easy to miss yet are capable of chewing up and spitting out a Black Friday campaign.
Bonus tip: Increase your low stock thresholds
If your low stock threshold globally is, say, 30 units, increase it to 40 (assuming it won’t make everything on the site low stock).
- It creates a greater sense of urgency sooner, which, by design, it should, considering goods should be selling at a higher rate and faster.
- It gives potential customers an opportunity to respond sooner, before something fully goes out of stock.
To conclude…
There we have it! My last-minute Black Friday campaign checklist to help ensure yours is the most successful yet and it runs without too many website gremlins.
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