Black Friday 2026 is Friday, November 27, and Cyber Monday is November 30. Thanksgiving falls on Thursday, November 26, and for most stores the busiest stretch runs from that Thursday through Monday night. If you run early deals, your season starts whenever you say it does.
Most BFCM problems we see come from things nobody checked: a discount that ended a day early, a theme edit published on Friday morning, a best-seller that kept selling after it ran out. This checklist runs by timeline, from mid-October to the week after Cyber Monday.
The short version
- Six weeks out (mid-October): decide your offers, check stock and reorder times, set your shipping cut-off dates and plan who's working.
- Two weeks out (by November 13): freeze theme and app changes, check speed, place test orders, confirm tracking, agree a fraud plan and write your customer service answers.
- The weekend (November 26–30): watch orders, stock and discounts in real time, and don't edit the live theme.
- After (December): handle returns, ask for reviews, send a thank-you email and restock for the gift season.
Six weeks out: offers, stock, shipping and staff
1. Decide the offer, then build the discounts
Pick one clear offer per audience rather than a pile of codes: a sitewide percentage, a gift with purchase, a threshold ("spend $100, save $20") or early access for your email list. Write down each start and end time first.
Then build them in Discounts. Every discount has an Active dates section: set the start date and time, click Set end date and set when it stops. If you don't set an end date, the discount doesn't expire, which is how a Black Friday price quietly runs into January. Automatic discounts apply without a code; discount codes need the shopper to type them.
If you're running several offers at once, decide which ones are allowed to combine. Our guide to stacking Shopify discounts walks through combinations and how to plan a promo calendar around them.
2. Check stock against the offer
For every product you plan to feature, compare what you have with what the offer might sell, and find out how long a reorder takes. In the product's Inventory section, make sure quantities are tracked, and leave Continue selling when out of stock off for anything you can't restock before Christmas.
When you read stock levels, look at Available, not On hand. On hand includes units already committed to unfulfilled orders and draft orders, and units set aside as unavailable, so it overstates what you can still sell.
3. Set shipping cut-off dates
Carriers publish their holiday shipping deadlines each autumn. Take the last day each service delivers before December 25, subtract your own processing time, and that's your cut-off for each shipping method. Check your rates and delivery methods under Settings → Shipping and delivery, and if you show delivery dates at checkout, confirm your processing time reflects December volume, not a quiet week in August.
Then tell shoppers: the announcement bar, product pages, the cart and your order confirmation. Most themes include an announcement bar section you can edit in the theme editor. If you want the message to switch itself on and off by date, our Announcer & Countdown app has a Published at and an Expires at field for each bar, so a "Order by December 15 for Christmas delivery" bar can go live and expire on schedule, and a countdown timer can count down to the same expiry time. Scheduling is included on the free plan.
If gift orders are a big part of your season, read our guide to shipping gifts to multiple addresses before your cut-offs are set, since each recipient becomes a separate shipment.
4. Plan who's working
Write a rota for November 26 to 30: who packs, who answers customers, who reviews flagged orders, and who may change the store. Give seasonal help their own user account with a role that only includes what they need. An agency or freelancer should use a collaborator account.
Two weeks out: freeze, test and prepare
Aim to finish this section by Friday, November 13. After that, the store should only change on purpose.
5. Freeze theme and app changes
Pick a date after which nobody publishes theme edits, installs apps or changes checkout settings unless something is broken. For your sale design (banners, badges, a Black Friday homepage), go to Online Store → Themes, open the menu next to your live theme and choose Duplicate. Build the sale version on the copy, preview it on a phone, and publish it when the sale starts. The old theme stays in your library as a way back. Shopify allows 20 themes per store, so delete an old copy if you're at the limit.
New apps belong before the freeze, not after: each one adds code to your storefront. We explain why in why Shopify apps slow down your store.
6. Check speed with real data
Shopify's web performance report (under Online Store → Themes, or Analytics → Reports) shows Largest Contentful Paint, Interaction to Next Paint and Cumulative Layout Shift from real visitor sessions over the past 30 days. The data can lag by up to 36 hours, so make speed fixes early enough to see whether they worked.
7. Place test orders
Test the full path: product page, cart, discount, checkout, confirmation email. With Shopify Payments, go to Settings → Payments, click Manage, and in the Test mode section choose Enable test mode. Pay with Shopify's test card 4242 4242 4242 4242. Test orders aren't charged and don't appear in your reports.
Test each offer, each shipping zone you serve, and at least one order on a phone.
8. Confirm tracking and reporting
Check each test order shows up in your analytics, your ad platforms and your email platform. A missing purchase event is easier to fix in early November than to explain afterwards.
9. Agree a fraud plan
Fraud attempts don't pause for the holidays, and a busy team is more likely to miss one. Shopify's fraud analysis rates each order low, medium or high risk and gives a recommendation: You can fulfill this order, Confirm with the customer before fulfilling or Consider canceling this order. Decide in advance who reviews flagged orders and what they do. Our fraudulent orders survival guide covers the review process in detail.
For limited stock, Shopify's Add-to-cart limit (under Settings → Checkout) caps how many of each product fit in one cart, and Shopify Plus stores can schedule bot protection for a drop. If you want a specific limit on a single doorbuster, such as two per order, our Order Limits app sets a maximum per product or variant and checks it again at checkout. More on the native setting in controlling cart quantities.
10. Write your customer service answers
Most BFCM messages ask the same five things. Write each answer once as a saved reply in your helpdesk or inbox:
- Where is my order, and when will it arrive?
- What's the last day to order for Christmas delivery?
- My discount code didn't work.
- Can I change or cancel my order?
- What's your holiday return policy?
The weekend: what to watch
From Thanksgiving to Cyber Monday, the job is watching. Analytics → Live View shows visitors right now, total sales, sessions, orders and top products, and how many sessions have active carts, are in checkout or have purchased in the last 10 minutes.
- Stock on featured products. Check it every few hours and switch promotions to a different product before one sells out.
- Discounts turning on and off. Check each offer went live at its start time, and that early-access codes stopped when they should.
- Sessions but no orders. A sudden gap usually means checkout, payments or a discount is broken. Place an order yourself.
- Platform status. If something looks wrong everywhere at once, check Shopify's status page before changing your store.
- Fraud queue and inbox. Clear both twice a day.
After Cyber Monday: returns, reviews, email and stock
- Returns. Under Settings → Policies, return rules set your return window (14, 30 or 90 days, unlimited, or custom), return shipping costs, any restocking fee and which items are final sale. If you extend the window for holiday gifts, say so in your policy. Refunds to store credit keep money in the business, as we covered in refunding to store credit.
- Reviews. Ask BFCM customers for a review after their order has arrived, not on the day it ships. Gifts may not be opened until late December.
- A post-sale email. Thank new customers, confirm what to expect with delivery, and remind them of your cut-off dates. It doesn't need another discount.
- Stock. Reconcile what sold, reorder best-sellers for December, and pause promotions for anything sold out.
Shopify built-in vs apps
Most of this checklist needs only Shopify. Apps fill a few gaps:
| Task | Built into Shopify | When an app helps |
|---|---|---|
| Schedule sale prices | Discounts with start and end dates | Rarely needed |
| Shipping cut-off message | Theme announcement bar, edited by hand | Bars that go live and expire on a schedule, with a countdown |
| Stop overselling | Inventory tracking, continue-selling setting | Rarely needed |
| Limit quantities | Add-to-cart limit per item; bot protection on Plus | Different limits per product, variant or collection |
| Speed check | Web performance report | Only once you know what's slow |
| Returns | Return rules, self-serve returns | Exchanges and complex policies |
If something goes wrong
- A discount isn't applying. Check its active dates and time zone, its minimum requirements, whether it's allowed to combine with another discount in the cart, and whether the products are actually in the discount's selection.
- Nobody can check out. Check Shopify Payments isn't still in test mode.
- The speed report hasn't changed after a fix. It uses 30 days of real visits and can lag by up to 36 hours, so improvements show up gradually.
- A banner or countdown shows the wrong time. Scheduled times follow the time zone in Settings → General. Check it matches the time you advertised.
- The sale theme looks wrong. Republish the previous theme from Online Store → Themes, then fix the copy.
Common questions
When is Black Friday 2026?
Friday, November 27, 2026. Thanksgiving is Thursday, November 26, and Cyber Monday is November 30.
When should I start preparing for BFCM?
Six weeks out is a good start: that's mid-October for 2026. That leaves time to reorder stock, test discounts and finish theme changes before a freeze around November 13.
How do I schedule a Shopify discount for Black Friday?
Create the discount under Discounts, set the start date and time in the Active dates section, then click Set end date and choose when it ends. Check the time zone shown next to the time fields.
Can I limit how many of a product one customer buys?
Shopify's add-to-cart limit caps quantity per item in a cart for all products. For a different limit on specific products, variants or collections, an order limits app enforces it at checkout.
Get ready before November
If you want shipping cut-off and sale bars that switch on and off by themselves, install Announcer & Countdown from the Shopify App Store; the free plan includes scheduling. You'll find the rest of the apps we build on our apps page. And if you'd like a second pair of eyes on your store before the code freeze, talk to us.