To help you prepare for a successful sale, our support team compiled a list of tips and tricks to help merchants navigate the holiday season.
Black Friday: November 28th 2025
Cyber Monday: December 1st 2025
We hope this guide prepares you for Black Friday/Cyber Monday 2025 by highlighting the most effective promotions, helping you catch any issues before they occur, and putting you in a position to get the most out of our apps to help you sell more.
On this page:
Start early
Planning in advance gives you peace of mind! Preparing your offers now will give you the time you need to ensure:
The steps to redeem your offer are clear and visible to your customers
Everything works quickly to give customers the best possible experience while shopping
Your offers are error-free: issues can arise, especially when you have more than one app installed on your store
We recommend you prepare your sales as early as possible. Test them regularly prior to the sale, and reach out to our support team by November 15th if you have any concerns. By reaching out early, this ensures we have the time to get your sale ready for your customers. This is our busy season too so giving yourself ample time to get a resolution will reduce stress!
Test often, and test like a customer
You know your shop better than anyone, but your customers could be visiting your store for the first time. If a step for redeeming an offer isn't clear, customers could miss seeing promotions and you could miss out on a conversion or a larger sale.
So when testing your offer, pretend you're seeing your shop for the first time. This can help catch issues with your setup before customers arrive. After each round of changes, test again to ensure everything still works. Test early, test often, and especially after each big change you make to your shop.
Testing in an incognito window will give an idea of how the shop will work for a first-time visitor.
Once everything is working well consider implementing a freeze on any major changes to your shop during the week leading up to BFCM. This will help ensure there are no unpleasant surprises at the last minute.
Simplify
Overcomplicated offers or running many different offers at once is a common issue we see in support. This can easily be avoided by simplifying your offers.
When using a variety of offer types, make sure the offers are targeting different products and collections. Ultimate Special Offers can run different types of offers at one time, but running simpler offers or only one at a time is a great way to ease the process for your customers.
Simplify the list of trigger conditions for your offers. For example, create collections containing your trigger or offered products and target those specifically rather than targeting "all collections". This will keep promotion items in one convenient place which makes them easier to manage.
Simplify your shop. Be aware that Ajax carts and checkout shortcuts may bypass the apps you depend on, potentially causing customers to miss your offers.
Consider pausing apps or customizations that don't drive sales to help your shop load as quickly as possible so you can give your customers a great experience.
If you're using Shopify's multi-currency feature, make sure to check our guide on how to use multi-currency and Ultimate Special Offers together.
And if you feel your offer is not visible enough, consider our app Pixelpop! There are lots of great features on our free plan to complement your BFCM promotions. Click here to learn more.
What’s popular
Not sure where to get started? Why not try one of our most popular offer types!
BOGO and Bundle offers are easy to set up and perform well during busy sale periods. We see many of these offer types during the BFCM season!
Browse our Ultimate Special Offers demo shop to get an idea of how each offer works on the storefront!
Stick to one app and one discount at a time
Shopify orders can only apply one discount app at a time. You can also set them up to combine with certain types of Shopify discount codes.
Note: Although you’re only able to use one discount app at a time, you can combine multiple offers for customers to be able to stack discounts! Check out our setting for that.
Two discount apps can’t work together at the same time because they’re vying for the same spot at the checkout. They cancel each other out.
Adding a new app can also cause code conflicts, so be sure to duplicate your theme before installing any new app (discount app or other!) Having a backup of your theme allows you to easily revert the shop to a working state if you notice any issues.
Keep a change log
Keeping a change log handy leading up to BFCM as you adjust settings, tweak your code, and install new apps. This means keeping track of any apps installed, code customizations implemented, changes made. It will help you identify the root of an issue if you can point to dates changes were made.
By keeping notes about the changes you make you can more easily backtrack if something suddenly stops working. Shopify's theme editor also provides a tool to allow you to revert files back to their previous states which is useful to keep in mind as you make changes.
Make it a habit to create frequent theme backups. Unexpected errors can arise at any moment, and having a backup ready can save you lots of time and frustration!
Tips for writing into support:
Live chat support is available between 10 AM and 5 PM EST. You can access it from the lower left chat icon in your app admin
Screenshots and brief videos illustrating your issue is a huge help for us. Tools like loom.com are a great way to do this!
Including links to specific products or orders that demonstrate an issue will get you faster support. It allows us to test the issue right away.
If you're using Shopify's collaborator access codes, be sure to share the code with us in your first message so that we can send you the proper permissions faster.
Collaborator access requests are automatically sent by Shopify to the account owner’s email. Please be prepared to access that so you can approve our request to access your shop.