What Black Friday 2025 Exposed About Ecommerce Operations [Expert Analysis]

1. Revenue Alone Doesn’t Make a Promotion Successful

It’s very easy to measure Black Friday success by the metric that is growing fastest. Traffic is exciting and orders are even more so. Revenue, of course, is often the holy grail. But none of these numbers automatically tells you how you’re doing in terms of profit. This is the same reason we recommend calculating the true all-in cost of fulfillment before you get in over your head.

Taebi’s BFCM 2025 example is useful because the promotional stack was not irrational. Some manufacturers were running programs as aggressive as “buy three, get one free.” USAWheels and CanadaWheels passed those incentives through and then added another 10% storewide discount. Depending on the product and supplier program, shoppers could see combined savings up to 40%.

Every individual discount was rational. There is nothing inherently wrong with that. A manufacturer can fund part of the offer. A retailer can intentionally trade some margin for customer acquisition. Shipping subsidies can make sense. A company may even be happy to make less on the first order if it has good evidence that the customer will be worth more later. The danger is failing to distinguish a deliberate subsidy from an expensive habit.

This is best explained through a counterexample. Take Hockerty and Sumissura, the online made-to-measure clothing brands. Salva Jovells, Head of Marketing, told us their prices and margins are deliberately tight, which “doesn’t allow us to be on these stupid (sorry) forever discounts.” Their philosophy is to keep the everyday price fair rather than continually manufacture a promotional price.

Not every brand can do this. Many Black Friday shoppers expect promotions, and it’s likely not wise to deny them. But the underlying discipline travels very well. It’s important to know what exactly bankrolls the discount.

For 2026, Taebi says USAWheels and CanadaWheels plan to move away from leaning primarily on one storewide discount. Instead, offers will vary at the supplier, brand, and product-category level based on available manufacturer funding and the contribution margin of the product. They also plan to establish contribution-margin requirements before the event. That way, on their end, they’ll be able to monitor ad efficiency and shipping expense daily, and break the week into phases. This gives them a chance to change offers and ad budgets as they need to.

This is a much better solution to a very thorny problem than the more basic: “how much are we discounting this year?”

Define what a win looks like before the season starts. That might mean revenue and new customers, but not at the cost of overall profitability.

2. BFCM Will Find The Weakest Link in Your Technical Stack

Sometimes Black Friday failures show up in the form of a website that goes offline. But you need not run into the most dramatic case to have a tough time. Curtis says one of the surprises from BFCM 2025 was that a store could remain technically online while becoming effectively unusable.

This has no doubt happened to you at some point. You go to a website and the page loads. But you can’t, for the life of you, seem to get the checkout to go through. Now imagine that happening with your customers on your website during peak season.

Also worth mentioning is that online commerce is increasingly mobile. Salesforce reported that mobile devices drove 70% of U.S. and global online orders during Cyber Week 2025. So the full purchase path has to work under peak conditions on the devices people are using, not merely in a clean desktop test.

Curtis recommends testing the complete journey. That means product search, cart actions, login, payment, and order confirmation all need to work. Testing only a homepage can create false confidence because the expensive transactions happen deeper in the application.

Dan Kabakov, an advertising specialist, supplied a good small example of what this looks like in practice. On one eCommerce account outside the holiday period, he says a Google Merchant Center feed fell from roughly 10,000 live products to 515. Nobody caught it for weeks because the Google Ads account still looked normal. When the same failure happened months later, a daily live-item check caught it the same day. Same failure, dramatically different cost because the detection time changed.

This is why fulfillment integrations need to be tested regularly too. Orders, inventory, tracking, shopping carts, ERPs, ad feeds, and warehouse systems all exchange data. A delay or mismatch that costs a little money in an ordinary week can become very expensive when the order curve goes vertical.

For BFCM 2026, the lesson is that websites can’t fail silently. You need a way to know if this is happening to you. And you need a plan for fixing it if it does.

3. Inventory Problems Don’t Stay Inside the Warehouse

The standard issue peak-season inventory advice can be summed up in five words. Don’t run out of stock. This is good advice, to be very clear, it’s just not enough on its own.

Joel Goldstein runs Mr. Checkout Distributors, a network serving independent grocery, convenience, and pharmacy stores. He says brands that sell both DTC and through retail can allocate their best inventory to the direct Black Friday promotion, post great DTC numbers, and only discover the real cost in December or January when distributors cannot reorder the SKU and a retailer replaces the brand on the shelf.

The same promotion can create a pricing problem. If a consumer sees a product discounted 40% direct while an independent store still has it at full shelf price, the retailer gets the uncomfortable customer conversation. Goldstein says brands in his network have then had to defend their wholesale pricing to the buyer after a promotion that was intended only for their DTC audience.

Goldstein’s advice here is delightful in its simplicity. Figure out how much inventory is ring-fenced for wholesale and do not release it. If you want a much deeper DTC offer, put it on bundles or sizes not sold through retail. It’s the best way to avoid stepping on your retail partners’ toes.

We mention this in our inventory management guide as well. Inventory management is not merely counting what exists. You are constantly balancing availability, cash tied up in stock, reorder timing, and where the product needs to be.

Cross-border ecommerce makes the definition of “available” even stricter. Kiran Kotla, founder and CEO of Distacart, told us Dista classifies and validates every SKU before shipment, standardizes labels and documentation, and restricts products by destination when ingredients or regulatory requirements do not permit them. He considers it to be a very important goal to eliminate uncertainty before the shipment moves. He doesn’t want customers wondering whether an order will clear customs or be held up because of a compliance issue.

Most domestic brands won’t run into cross-border problems like this. But the basic conceptual point is still useful. Namely, units on shelves are not automatically units you should promise to every customer on every channel.

BFCM planning should therefore include explicit allocation decisions, not just a top-line forecast. Those include:

Which inventory is protected for wholesale?
Which SKUs are safe to discount aggressively?
Which products become unprofitable if shipping is subsidized?
Which channel wins if two systems try to sell the last 100 units?

It costs less to answer these questions in September than on Cyber Monday.

4. Your Marketing Can Only Move As Fast As Your Warehouse

We saw this pattern repeatedly while reporting our earlier expert analysis on when eCommerce businesses should outsource fulfillment. The obvious signs of a fulfillment problem are late orders and overwhelmed staff. The more important signs often show up earlier, when operations start changing what the rest of the company is willing to attempt.

Jaime Hill, an eCommerce and digital director with experience across DTC and omnichannel businesses, told us marketing can become constrained by operations. When that happens, it looks like the business avoiding campaigns because fulfillment cannot safely handle a spike. She also pointed to rising WISMO (“Where is my order?”) tickets, inventory inaccuracies, overselling, and inefficient temporary labor as warning signs.

That is a nasty place to be because nothing has necessarily “failed” yet. The marketing plan is simply smaller than it could have been. And it’s also a tough situation to get out of because it’s hard to notice an absence of revenue that would have otherwise existed.

Of course, “outsource” isn’t always the answer. Chris Carroll, who has personally overseen warehouse operations, says in-house fulfillment can provide better margins, faster problem resolution, and tighter inventory control. When inbound freight is damaged, inventory goes missing, or a pickup fails, direct ownership can make the response much faster.

If you do outsource, choosing the right 3PL becomes part of the same peak-season problem. Joseph Zigelboum, founder of Brooklyn Botany and operator of four beauty brands, told us he evaluates 3PLs like suppliers. “It’s not about who looks best on paper, it’s about who actually performs when things go wrong.” His non-negotiables include inventory accuracy, reliable shipping with clear SLAs, real visibility into inventory and orders, predictable pricing, and direct access to somebody who can actually act.

Matthew Beeson, Senior Director of Platform Growth at nShift, frames the capacity question around carrier coverage, automation, and fulfillment locations. If those are in place, he argues, even Black Friday surges become much more manageable.

And if a provider merely says “yes” to every capacity question without showing the mechanism, that itself is a warning sign. Daniel Baker, Head of Ecommerce and Marketplaces at Blue Vanilla Clothing, told us to ask how big the warehouse is, how many facilities the provider has, and how large its biggest existing clients are so the brand knows where it will sit in the priority stack.

This becomes especially important because the worst time to discover your capacity ceiling is while you are already pressing against it.

Hill called moving to a 3PL during a crisis “the worst possible moment,” closely followed by migrating immediately before or during peak season. Our 3PL red-flags analysis reached the same practical conclusion from another direction. Claims about peak capacity should be tested before inventory and customers depend on them.

So the 2026 question is not “Should we outsource before Black Friday?” It is “What is our fulfillment ceiling, how do we know, and what happens when we cross it?”

5. Customers See Operational Problems As a Reason to Distrust You

Operations see delays as work to be done. Customers see it as “where is that package I ordered?”

Leo Park, founder and CEO of Seoul Beauty Club, gave us a useful example from a young cross-border business. When tariffs were introduced, the company chose to absorb the cost rather than immediately pass it to subscribers. Park says that hurt unit economics, but he believes it helped build trust. More recently, the company experienced delivery delays while transitioning logistics to a U.S.-based warehouse. His stated lesson was to “take a deep look at what’s happening and fix the core problems.”

You can reasonably disagree with absorbing a tariff. Plenty of companies cannot afford to do it, and indefinite subsidies are not a strategy. The interesting part is the tradeoff: the business understood that a cost decision would also be interpreted as a trust decision by the customer.

Kiran Kotla of Distacart makes the customer side even plainer. Asked when service became strategically important for a cross-border marketplace, he answered: “Very, very early.” Then: “In cross-border commerce, silence destroys trust. A shipment delayed without explanation feels worse than a slow but well-communicated one.”

Dista’s response has been to emphasize proactive tracking, accurate documentation, predictable customs handling, and ownership of the shipment end to end. Kotla also identifies “unpredictability” as the real operational nightmare, citing customs delays, documentation issues, and tariffs as being ways unit economics can go sideways fast.

Customers can often tolerate delays better than expected. They will often tolerate an honest stockout, an extra day in transit, or a clearly stated order cutoff. What they hate is ambiguity: an item that looked available but is not, a tracking page stuck at “label created,” an order that appears to have vanished, or support giving a different story every time they ask.

That makes customer communication part of the order-fulfillment process. The order is not complete because the label is printed. It is complete when the customer receives what they expected, roughly when they expected it.

What Ecommerce Brands Should Do for a Smooth BFCM 2026

When you look at all of this information together, it’s tempting to think it needs to be a 25-item Black Friday checklist. We’re not going to do that here. Instead, here are four operating decisions that, made before BFCM starts in earnest, will save you a lot of trouble.

1. Define the win economically before the promotion starts.

Don’t just think about revenue. Think about profitability. Set a contribution margin floor and decide how much discounting you are willing to fund at the cost of margin.

You can absolutely choose to take lower margins in order to acquire customers when they’re especially eager to buy. Just know what you’re getting into.

It’s especially important to model expected advertising and shipping costs. That can tell you how much of a haircut you’ll be taking in order to acquire first-timers.

2. Identify the systems that can fail silently.

The site needs to not just be online. Keep an eye on the places where performance can degrade without necessarily throwing a 500 error. All kinds of things can break under stress like product-feed item counts and inventory syncs. Order backlogs can go screwy and checkouts can fail to complete. Even your marketing stack needs to be in good shape, since you don’t exactly want conversion tracking to stop working right when you’ve got a glut of data to process.

Make sure all critical systems have owners who can take action if something goes wrong. It’s worth wargaming out a few scenarios like:

If a feed loses half its products, who knows first?
If inventory stops synchronizing, how long until the promotion is paused?
If checkout completion suddenly drops, who can make the call to reduce paid spend?

3. Decide what happens when demand outruns the plan.

Forecasting matters, but no forecast survives contact with a viral post, a competitor stockout, or an unexpectedly strong offer. Build a response for 1.5x, 2x, or 3x demand. Think about which channels should keep their inventory and which promotions should get throttled if you see a huge surge in orders. Think about which SKUs can substitute when others are out of stock.

It’s especially worth making sure your fulfillment operations are ready to go. If you use a fulfillment partner, these are the kinds of questions to settle while evaluating the partner, ideally in the off-season.

4. Write the failure-state communication before you need it.

Decide what customers will see if a SKU runs out, a carrier misses a cutoff, an order is delayed, or a system goes down. Prepare the email, on-site language, support macro, and escalation path now. It’s a lot easier to plan this stuff now when you’re not under pressure, because that’s the exact same moment where it will be hard to think clearly.

It’s worth remembering Kotla’s line as a gold standard: silence destroys trust. The business may not be able to control the carrier, customs, weather, or every system failure. It can control whether the customer is left in the dark.

Black Friday Doesn’t Create Most of These Problems

If you had five times the traffic and more than three times the orders for your eCommerce store, you’d probably call that a win. But that’s what happened to USAWheels right when their contribution margin went down by 15%.

Both things can be true. And it doesn’t even have to mean dramatic failure. Sometimes, you just wind up looking back and saying you wished you’d done it differently.

Websites can be online while checkout spins and spins. Inventory can be in stock but impossible to get out the door on time because marketing has pushed demand beyond fulfillment capacity. Packages can still be moving even while customers wonder where they are.

And this can all happen any time of the year. It’s just more noticeable on Black Friday.

That is why the best preparation for BFCM 2026 is not necessarily a more aggressive promotional calendar. It is a clearer picture of the business underneath the promotion. You need to know what each incremental order contributes, which systems are fragile, which inventory is available, where capacity tops out, and how quickly customers will know when reality diverges from the plan.

The useful question is not only, “How do we sell more?”

It is: “What breaks if we do?”

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About the author

Brandon Rollins, MBA, is the Director of Marketing at Fulfillrite. He typically writes about how eCommerce and crowdfunding brands can manufacture, freight ship, and fulfill products, as well as scale their businesses. You can find his work featured on Kickstarter.com, CrowdCrux, Retailbound, and Launchboom. He has been quoted in CMSWire, Quartz, Whatagraph, and Atlassian.

Brandon Rollins