How a small business should plan for Black Friday to Cyber Monday
Bizer · 2026-10-01
Thanksgiving falls on Thursday 26 November 2026. That makes Black Friday 27 November, Small Business Saturday 28 November and Cyber Monday 30 November. Christmas is a Friday. If you sell anything that has to be shipped, made or ordered in, most of your holiday season is decided before the first of those dates.
This page used to be a list of 2017 Cyber Monday deals. A deals list is stale by Tuesday. The planning question is not.
How big is the season, really?
Big, and mostly not for you. The National Retail Federation reported that US holiday retail sales for November and December 2025 grew 4.1 percent, to just over $1 trillion. Adobe, which measures online spending, counted $14.25 billion spent online on Cyber Monday 2025 alone and $257.8 billion online across the season.
Those numbers are dominated by the largest retailers, and they are won with discounts that a small shop cannot match. Read them as the size of the noise you are competing with, not as your share of the pie.
Should you run a Black Friday sale?
Probably not a deep one. Run the arithmetic on a product you sell at $100 that costs you $60. You make $40. Take 20 percent off and you sell it at $80 and make $20. You now have to sell twice as many to make the same money, during the one week every customer's inbox is full of offers from companies with bigger budgets.
Compete where they cannot:
- Small Business Saturday. American Express started it in 2010, on the Saturday after Thanksgiving, to send shoppers to local businesses. It is the one day of the long weekend built for you. Put your effort there.
- Gift-ready. Wrapping, a handwritten card, a gift receipt. These cost you little and save the buyer the part they dislike.
- Gift cards. They sell late, when shipping deadlines have passed, and the customer comes back in January. Under federal rules enforced by the CFPB, the money on a store gift card cannot expire sooner than five years after it is issued or last loaded. Your state may add more rules.
- A smaller offer that protects margin. A free add-on with purchase or free shipping above an order size usually costs less than a percentage off everything.
What to do, working back from the date
In October. Order stock now. Supplier lead times stretch in the autumn, and running out on the best week of the year is the most expensive mistake on this page. Decide your one offer, and write down what it costs you per sale.
By early November. Publish your last order date for delivery by Christmas, based on the cutoff dates your carriers announce, minus the days you need to pack. USPS, UPS and FedEx each publish holiday deadlines in the autumn; use theirs, not last year's. Book any extra help now, not on the Wednesday before Thanksgiving.
Thanksgiving week. Tell the people who already bought from you first. Your own list of past customers will outperform any ad you could afford that week, because they already trust you and nobody else can reach them.
December. Keep your word on shipping. The FTC's mail order rule requires you to ship within the time you stated, or within 30 days if you stated none, and to offer a full refund if you will be late. December is when small stores break it. The checklist for a store that sells covers the rule and the rest of checkout.
What does it cost you to skip the season?
Sometimes nothing worth having. A bookkeeper, a roofer or a B2B supplier may do better spending late November getting January's work booked. Holiday planning is for businesses whose customers are buying gifts. If yours are not, do not run a sale because everyone else is.
Plan for January as well
The season ends on 25 December, but the work does not. Returns arrive. Gift cards get spent. Customers who found you in December are worth more than any single sale they made, so ask them for a review and make sure you have a way to reach them again before the decorations come down.
What is uncertain
Nobody knows how 2026 will compare with 2025 until it is over. NRF and Adobe publish forecasts each autumn, and both were close in 2025, but a forecast for the whole country says little about one shop in one town. The safer plan is the one that still works in a flat year: stock you can sell into January, an offer that protects your margin, and a list of customers you can tell first.
