Black Friday eCommerce
Thursday, October 2, 2025
With Black Friday just around the corner we wanted to put together some of our recommended strategies and tips for eCommerce brands to improve profitability over this busy period.
Black Friday used to be about slashing prices and watching orders roll in. But in 2025, high ad costs, rising return rates, and fragile supply chains mean that chasing top-line revenue without a clear profit plan is a recipe for regret.
This year, leading eCommerce brands aren’t just preparing to sell more, they're planning to sell smarter and make more profit than ever.
In this guide, we’ll show you how to build a Black Friday eCommerce strategy that maximizes profitability, not just clicks or orders. From forecasting inventory to setting discount guardrails to leveraging AI tools like Conjura and Owly AI, you'll walk away with a game plan to win the season and the months that follow.
Here’s a quick-hit checklist of what a profit-first Black Friday setup looks like:
Let’s dig into the strategy behind each of these.
Don’t just discount without a profitability model; that’s a recipe for disaster!
Before launching your promo calendar, set contribution profit targets at the SKU and category level. That means understanding your gross profit, variable costs, return rates, and ad spend attribution, all broken down by product.
If a product has a 65% gross margin but a 25% refund rate and eats 30% of every ad dollar, that generous 30% discount isn’t doing you any favours…
Use these guardrails:
It’s not about being stingy, it’s about being smart. When contribution profit is your gold standard metric, you can afford to be bold without bleeding margin.
It’s one of the worst Black Friday feelings: seeing your best-performing SKU sell out by 2 p.m. on Friday… and staring at shelves of slow-moving inventory by January.
That’s why a strong demand forecast, powered by SKU-level data and AI, is your best defence.
Tools like Conjura’s AI Inventory Forecasting can help model demand based on seasonality, promo depth, and past performance, so you’re buying (and selling) with confidence.
Sure, everyone wants more site traffic over Black Friday weekend. But not all clicks equate to the same value for your business.
Without quality control, you risk attracting deal hunters who buy once and bounce, or worse, return half the order. The goal? Traffic that converts profitably and sticks around.
And most importantly, track traffic quality by SKU. Some products are natural click magnets but don’t convert. Others quietly crush it.
Not every product needs a 30% discount to fly off the shelves. In fact, blanket sitewide discounts are often margin killers.
Instead, use historical data to identify price-sensitive SKUs versus inelastic performers. You might find that your top sellers convert just as well with a gift-with-purchase or free shipping offer instead of a discount.
Use your refund rate and profit margin data to determine which SKUs to include in your core Black Friday offer and which to leave out. A SKU with a high return rate and low margin shouldn’t be the face of your BFCM campaign.
The brands that win Black Friday don’t wait until November to figure out what works. They’ve been testing promos, refining creative, and warming up their audience for months.
Here’s a phased approach:
If you’re relying on last-click ROAS alone to measure success over Black Friday, you’re missing a trick.
Why? Because ROAS often ignores returns, refund rates, contribution margin, and cross-product behavior. It tells you what looked good on paper, not what actually made money.
With Conjura, you can track real-time contribution profit by product, surface recommendations like "Stop Advertising" or "Increase Prices," and monitor landing-page-to-revenue conversion to catch winners before they run out.
Once the dust settles, the work’s not over.
The weeks after Black Friday are critical for managing returns, optimizing cash flow, and turning one-time buyers into loyal customers.
Conjura’s product actions, combined with Owly AI make this easy, suggesting pricing changes, promo exposure, and markdown candidates based on live performance data.
Black Friday has never been more competitive. With rising acquisition costs, complex customer journeys, and razor-thin margins, the ability to make decisions at SKU-level speed isn’t just an advantage, it’s essential.
That’s exactly where Conjura comes in. Built for eCommerce operators who care about contribution profit (not just vanity metrics), Conjura helps brands turn their data into high-impact, margin-saving decisions before, during, and after Black Friday.
In the weeks and months before Black Friday, your goal is to build a clear view of your product, marketing, and inventory performance so you can enter November with confidence.
By the time Black Friday hits, your strategy is no longer based on gut feel or last year’s guesswork, it’s built on clean, live data.
Black Friday weekend moves fast. So should your decisions.
Conjura gives you real-time visibility into SKU-level contribution profit, stock health, and marketing efficiency, so you can act before margin leaks turn into profit losses.
Your team won’t be staring at 10 spreadsheets trying to make sense of chaos, they’ll have a single source of truth guiding what to scale, pause, or protect.
Once the orders slow down, it’s time to analyze, learn, and optimize.
Conjura supports post-BFCM decision-making in two major ways:
And with AI Forecasting baked in, you’ll be able to feed actual sales performance back into your Q1 buying plan, improving accuracy for your next big campaign.
Black Friday weekend doesn’t wait for Monday-morning analysis. That’s why Owly AI, Conjura’s decision-support agent, is built to act as you trade.
Owly isn’t just another chatbot or AI wrapper. It’s your very own personal data analyst, available 24/7.
Owly will deliver recommendations like:
“SKU #1189 is spending 4x more than its gross profit. Suggest: reduce ad budget by 40% and increase price by 10%.”
“Stock cover for your top revenue-driving bundle is under 4 days. Suggest: cap promo and shift spend to bundle #2.”
Rather than sifting through dashboards or waiting for analysts, your team gets bite-sized insights with context and actions, at the moment they need them.
One of the biggest pitfalls brands face during Black Friday is misaligned inventory, over-ordering SKUs that barely move and under-stocking the ones that fly off the shelves. It’s a painful and costly mistake that can tank margins or leave revenue on the table.
That’s where Conjura’s AI Inventory Forecasting comes in. It enables brands to forecast demand at the product level, factoring in key variables like seasonality, historical performance, and the depth of planned promotions. Instead of relying on gut instinct or high-level averages, you get a data-backed forecast tailored to each SKU.
Beyond just predicting demand, Conjura helps set stock cover targets by considering sales velocity, ad budget allocation, and supplier lead times. This ensures you’re stocking the right amount of each product, enough to meet demand without tying up unnecessary cash.
It also helps identify tail SKUs, the long tail of products that likely won’t benefit from deep inventory or aggressive promotion. By deprioritizing these SKUs in your ordering and marketing plan, you can focus your resources where they’ll have the most impact.
After Black Friday, actual sales data can be fed back into the model, helping you refine future forecasts, especially for Q1 planning. The result is a smarter, more agile approach to inventory that protects both your revenue and your profit margin.
Looking to build out your Black Friday tech stack? Here’s a short list of AI tools that deliver real value during peak:
Conjura AI Inventory Forecasting
Models demand at SKU level, helping operators avoid both out-of-stock and overstock disasters.
Owly AI Agent (by Conjura)
Turns your eCommerce data into daily “do this next” recommendations. Think of it as a revenue ops assistant built for marketers and merchandisers.
Use tools like Jasper or AdCreative.ai to quickly generate ad variants, social headlines, and A/B test copy angles.
Tools like Gorgias and Tidio use AI to reduce WISMO (“Where is my order?”) tickets and help with post-purchase flows, especially important when returns spike in December.
Remember: AI should enhance your strategy, not replace it. Tools like Conjura help you focus your AI where it matters most, profit-driving decisions.
If you're interested in learning about more industry-leading AI tools to help your eCommerce business you can read our guide here.
Here’s a recap of what your team should have locked in before the big day:
In 2025, the brands that win Black Friday aren’t just the loudest. They’re the smartest.
They understand that profit > revenue, and that better data leads to better decisions, across pricing, inventory, promotions, and spend.
Whether you’re running your first BFCM or scaling toward $100M GMV, tools like Conjura and Owly AI can give you the clarity, control, and confidence to trade smarter, not just harder.
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