How to Schedule Black Friday Discounts
Black Friday is the one time of year when every Shopify merchant is touching prices at the same moment. The stores that pull it off smoothly do the work in October and November — not the Thursday night before. Here's how to prepare your discounts so they go live exactly when you want and end without a scramble on Monday.
Decide on your discount structure first
Before you touch the admin, know what you're discounting and by how much. Common approaches:
- Site-wide percentage off. Simple to run, easy to communicate. 20%, 30%, 40% off everything.
- Category tiers. Different discounts for different collections — deeper on slow movers, lighter on bestsellers.
- Select products. Hand-pick what goes on sale rather than blanketing the whole catalogue. More margin-controlled, slightly more setup work.
- Clearance plus regular. Full clearance discounts on older stock, modest discounts on current lines.
Your structure shapes how you set this up technically. A blanket discount can sometimes be handled with a code; product-level price changes need to be set per product and reversed afterwards.
When to load the discounts
Load sale prices at least a week before Black Friday — ideally two. The actual day is the worst time to be applying prices product by product, because there's no margin for error. Load everything in advance, verify it looks right, and let the schedule do the rest.
If you're using scheduled price changes, your workflow is:
- Load sale prices onto each product (or let a scheduler calculate them from a percentage).
- Set the scheduled start — typically midnight on Black Friday, or 12am Thursday evening if you're doing an early-access launch.
- Set the scheduled end — typically end of Cyber Monday, or midnight Sunday if you want a strict weekend window.
- Preview how the prices look before the launch date.
The BFCM timing window
Most merchants now run discounts across the full BFCM weekend rather than Black Friday only. That's four days: Black Friday through Cyber Monday. Set your end time for Cyber Monday night — late enough that US time zones get the full day. If you want to tease extended access, offer early entry Thursday for email subscribers before prices go public at midnight Friday.
What to check before launch
- Are all products showing the correct sale price, not the original?
- Does the scheduled start match the time zone your store is set to in Shopify?
- Is the scheduled end locked in? Don't leave prices to revert manually.
- Is your email/SMS queued for the moment the sale launches?
The stores that have a bad Black Friday usually had a badly prepared one. Load prices early. Set the schedule. Go to bed.