What to Do to Best Prepare Your eCommerce for Black Friday 2025?

Black Friday still drives a major revenue spike. That said, 2025 isn’t following the usual playbook. Customer attention is shifting to AI‑powered search and chat, and inboxes are getting harder to reach. On top of that, consumer sentiment is cooling, with surveys pointing to more price sensitivity and smaller holiday budgets compared to last year.

This year’s winners might not be the ones shouting the loudest or offering the biggest discounts. You’ll need to make smart technical upgrades, fine-tune delivery promises, and meet customers exactly where they’re looking.

Let’s break down Black Friday 2025 key trends and discuss what’s new and critical to act on now across customer experience, tech, fulfillment, checkout, and marketing strategy.

Strategic changes ahead of Black Friday 2025

Black Friday is about navigating some of the biggest market and regulatory shifts in years as much as it is about performance and price.

U.S. import rules have changed

As of late August, the U.S. has removed the de minimis duty exemption for many low-value shipments. That means fewer parcels enter duty-free, and some major couriers even paused U.S. services while updating their systems. Brands shipping cross-border, especially direct-from-factory or from Europe, are facing more paperwork and higher costs, and longer delivery timelines.

What to do:

• Recheck pricing and delivery estimates
• Add duty and tax calculation to checkout
• Display U.S. shipping cutoffs earlier in the customer journey
• Review SKUs by tariff exposure and reroute volume to domestic warehouses where it makes sense.

A shift in customer demand

According to multiple retail forecasts, U.S. shoppers are planning to spend less than they did in 2024 (roughly a 5% drop). Rising prices and uncertainty around import duties push buyers to delay decisions and hunt for better value. That means expectations around discounts and clarity are higher, and the margin for error is smaller. Plan clearer value ladders (good‑better‑best), targeted promos by segment, and fast re‑pricing playbooks for slow movers. 

Third-party cookies survive

Google has paused the final phase-out of third-party cookies in Chrome, delaying the full rollout of Privacy Sandbox, giving marketers more breathing room than expected. However, other browsers (like Safari) still block them by default, and attribution blind spots haven’t disappeared.

What to do:

• Keep building first-party audiences and contextual signals
• Revisit media models that assumed cookie loss in Q4
• Align measurement tools across channels now, before traffic peaks.

Customer experience & conversion

The buying journey in 2025 is shaped by where your customers arrive. AI-generated summaries, inbox filters, mobile checkout, and live chat are now the first points of contact, not your homepage.

Google’s AI Overviews and shopping features now appear above traditional listings for many search queries. If your product page doesn’t show price, availability, shipping, and return info in structured data, you may be invisible in this new layer of search.

What to do:

• Validate structured data (Product, Offer, ShippingDetails, MerchantReturnPolicy)
• Keep PDPs consistent with feed content, as Google pulls directly from these
• Use precise, scannable copy instead of generic benefits or long descriptions.

Email is losing ground

Especially on Apple devices. With iOS 18, Apple began automatically sorting emails into categories: Primary, Transactions, Updates, and Promotions. Most marketing emails are filtered out of sight, and only high-relevance or triggered sends stand a chance of reaching the Primary inbox. Merchants should rely more on triggered flows (price drops, low stock alerts, back-in-stock messages) and add SMS or push where appropriate for time-sensitive offers.

Make your site AI-smart

Your site should feel AI-smart even without a chatbot. This year, shoppers expect your site to show the right products, remember or predict preferences, and guide them to the next step without friction.

What to do:

• Add personalized product blocks to key pages
• Show real-time inventory and delivery estimates
• Enable pre-fill and shortcuts in checkout flows.

On mobile, UX is the performance

Mobile now drives most eCommerce traffic and revenue. Black Friday is no exception. Interactivity (INP) is the new benchmark, and if your pages take too long to respond to taps or clicks, customers drop off. Before the sales period, test the mobile INP and aim for less than 200ms on different devices. If needed, cut heavy scripts and non-critical animations.

Creativity matters

Shoppers will be hit with AI-generated ads from every direction this season. The ones that work won’t be flashy but thoughtful.

What to do:

• Focus on user-led storytelling: UGC, demo-style creatives, side-by-sides
• Keep visuals grounded in reality, but with a visual twist (motion, juxtaposition, or subtle humor)
• A/B test in advance

Payments & fulfillment

In 2025, the real friction shows up in post-purchase costs related to payment disputes, shipping surcharges, and returns.

BNPL keeps growing

Buy now, pay later volumes rose again last season, especially for gifting and big-ticket items. But that comes with a trade-off: higher returns and more disputes if the product doesn’t meet expectations. Also, after the holidays, many brands are hit with customers requesting chargebacks even after receiving the item. 

What to do:

• Show total-to-pay today and future instalments near the price
• Integrate with BNPL providers to pause repayments when returns are initiated
• Highlight your BNPL cutoff date for guaranteed holiday delivery
• Use clear billing descriptors and send delivery confirmation proactively
• Set limits on discounts per user

Returns can cost less

Returns ran close to 17% of total U.S. retail sales last year, which was nearly $900B in value. Holiday purchases tend to return at even higher rates, so many brands are shifting to more transparent, sometimes stricter, return policies. Merchants should make return timelines and restocking fees visible on product pages, offer drop-off options to reduce cost, and not forget about size/fit guides and post-purchase education to prevent returns altogether.

Where is my order?

With holiday purchases, “where is my order?” (WISMO) queries spike during Cyber Week and into December, straining support teams and hurting customer satisfaction. If you haven’t automated proactive updates and branded tracking yet, this is the last moment to do it.

What to do:

• Trigger frequent and clear milestone updates by email/SMS (confirmed, packed, shipped, etc.)
• Let customers self-manage shipping changes or rerouting where possible
• Use branded tracking pages to maintain experience post-purchase

Traffic acquisition: paid, organic, social, and AI

Traffic planning for Black Friday used to be straightforward: crank up Google Ads, send emails, and flood Meta with remarketing. That still works, kind of. In 2025, it’s only part of the picture. Attention is more fragmented, and new sources are influencing buying decisions.

AI chatbots as traffic drivers

During the 2024 holiday season, many brands saw their AI chatbots become top sources of assisted revenue. It’s still where a lot of decisions are happening. Shoppers use bots to check fit, shipping times, return policies, and even stock status, and then convert directly inside the chat. 

What to do:

• Train bots on size/fit, delivery timelines, return costs, and current stock
• Enable “buy now” actions directly in chat.

Community role in search results

For a while now, influence hasn’t been limited to influencers. Shoppers tend to turn to online communities when researching products, and what’s said there often finds its way into Google’s AI summaries or ChatGPT’s search-enabled answers.

What to do:

• Monitor brand mentions on community platforms, like Reddit, Quora, TikTok, and Pinterest, and correct misinformation
• Seed helpful, product-relevant content in forums where your audience actually looks
• Repurpose high-performing organic UGC into paid formats or landing pages.

Regarding promo timing to get traffic early – despite early-bird emails and pre-Black Friday deals, most revenue still concentrates in the Friday–Monday window. We suggest avoiding spending your entire promo budget in early November. Better, use early activity to test offers, then go deeper where elasticity is proven. Also, it’s good to have a clear plan for the second wave of promos after Cyber Monday.

Quick actions checklist

TECH

✔️ Audit mobile performance and target INP ≤200ms on all key templates
✔️ Freeze non-critical scripts, animations, and tracking tags by mid-November
✔️ Validate and fix structured data for Product, Offer, ReturnPolicy, and ShippingDetails
✔️ Clean up any Google Search Console warnings that may block merchant listing eligibility

UX & CRO

✔️ Add trust-building info to PDPs
✔️ Enable AI-style recommendations and quick-buy shortcuts to reduce friction
✔️ Run checkout flows on mid-range mobile devices
✔️ Review and reduce the number of form fields and input taps required to complete a purchase
✔️ Publish clear shipping cutoffs and build delivery messages into PDPs
✔️ Activate branded tracking pages and automated delivery updates

MARKETING

✔️ Shift creative toward realistic, trust-first content with subtle standout elements
✔️ Build or refresh your retail media campaigns
✔️ Prepare alternate promo creatives for TikTok/Meta in case one platform underperforms.

2025 shoppers are spending more carefully, traffic is fragmented, and operational costs are rising. But the brands that consider all this and prepare early will be in a position to win when the window opens.

Need help getting your store strategically, technically, logistically, and creatively ready for Black Friday? Let’s connect! Our expert teams offer audits and hands-on support to prep your site and campaigns for the big sale.

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