The deepest discount
of the year, for the
least loyal customer.

Should you discount on Black Friday?

Usually less than you think, and sometimes not at all. In 2025, Shopify merchants sold $14.6 billion over the BFCM weekend, so the traffic is real. But Black Friday pairs the year's most expensive impressions with the year's deepest discount, and the customers it brings in are the least likely to come back.

My view: cutting price to a break-even number on Black Friday is a losing game for most brands. It is the most competitive week of the year, so everyone is bidding for the same attention, and the shoppers who respond to the biggest number are shopping for the number. A record revenue weekend can still hand you a cohort that rarely earns back what you paid for it.

Some brands still have to play. If your category has trained shoppers to wait for Black Friday, sitting it out costs the biggest week of traffic you will get. For them a discount is a necessary evil, and the job is to keep it small, structured and pointed at the second order. The rest of this post is how to tell which kind of brand you are.

Is Black Friday the most expensive time to acquire customers?

It is the most expensive time to show an ad, but not always to win an order. In Lebesgue's 2025 Meta data, the median brand paid 59% more per thousand impressions in Black Friday week than in September, and 84% more on Black Friday itself. Conversion rose 48%, so cost per purchase fell 20%.

That last number is easy to skip, and it matters. Shoppers arrive ready to buy, so a click converts more often, and the platform reports a better return. Tinuiti measured Meta CPMs 12% higher year over year across Cyber Five 2024, so the auction keeps getting pricier, but a cheaper cost per purchase is easy to read as a good weekend.

The cost that matters is what the order turns into. A purchase bought 20% cheaper is still a bad deal if the customer never comes back and the discount took most of the margin. Both of those numbers sit outside Meta's dashboard, which is why the decision has to be made on your own customer data.

What do Black Friday customers do after the sale?

Mostly nothing. Ometria's 2025 analysis of its retail clients found that only 4% of Black Friday 2024 new customers made a repeat purchase within 12 months. Black Friday-acquired customers were also six times less likely to return than typical new customers. Just 11% of 2024's Black Friday shoppers came back for 2025's.

The academic work points the same way. Michael Lewis's 2006 study in the Journal of Marketing Research used customer data from a newspaper and an online grocer. Larger acquisition discounts went with lower repeat buying, and customers acquired at a 35% discount were worth about half as much over the long run as customers acquired without one.

Free offers behave the same. A 2015 study followed 16,512 households at a European digital TV provider. Customers who joined on a free trial produced about 59% less profit than standard customers, mostly because they left sooner. The cheaper the entry, the weaker the reason to stay.

There is a second cost, to customers you already have. Anderson and Simester (2004) found deeper discounts reduced later purchases by established customers. Your best buyers learn to wait for November. Bluecore's 2024 benchmark of 146 brands found that 36% of Black Friday 2024 purchases still came from returning buyers, many of whom might have paid full price.

Ometria's revenue split makes the same point from the other side: 45% of its clients' BFCM 2025 revenue came from new customers and 55% from existing ones. More than half the weekend's money came from people who already knew the brand, and a sitewide discount gives them the same cut it gives a stranger.

How do you test whether your BFCM 2025 discount worked?

Pull your Black Friday 2025 cohort and count how many have bought again at full price. Ometria's number for its clients was 4% within a year. If yours looks similar, that discount bought one order per customer, and matching it in 2026 will buy the same thing at higher ad prices.

1. Export customers whose first order fell in the BFCM 2025 window, Thanksgiving through Cyber Monday, from Shopify's customer and order reports.
2. Split them by whether that first order used a discount code, and note the depth.
3. For each group, count customers with a second order, and separately a second order with no discount code applied.
4. Run the same count for customers acquired in a normal month, such as September, as your baseline.
5. Compare gross profit per customer, not revenue, for each cohort over the same number of months.

Two cautions when you read the numbers. Twelve months is a short window for a durable product, so compare like with like: if your normal repeat cycle is 18 months, use 18. And a customer who came back only for the next sale is a discount buyer, not a full-price one, which is why step 3 counts the two separately.

My bet is that the full-price repeat number for the discounted Black Friday cohort is small, and much smaller than the September cohort. If it is, the case for a deep sitewide offer rests only on first-order profit, and at Black Friday depths there usually isn't much. The break-even table in the offer strategy post shows that at 60% gross margin, 25% off needs 71% more orders just to stand still.

If the cohort surprises you and repeats well, that is useful too. It means your Black Friday customer is a real customer, and a structured discount that brings them in is worth paying for. Use LTV measured as gross profit to set how much you can afford to give away on the first order.

When is a Black Friday discount worth running anyway?

When your category has trained buyers to wait, when you have inventory that has to move, or when your existing customers expect it and your cohort data says they return. In those cases, skipping the discount gives the week to a competitor. The decision is how small and how structured you can make it.

Apparel and electronics are the clearest trained categories: the BFCM peak-season playbook covers the depths shoppers expect in each and the operations side of the week. A brand selling a differentiated consumable has more room to hold price, because the comparison is with its own regular price, not a rival's sale.

Inventory is the other honest reason. Seasonal or end-of-line stock that would otherwise be written down is cheaper to clear in the week shoppers are looking. Keep it to those SKUs. A clearance discount on last season's colourways does far less damage than 30% off the hero product your repeat customers buy every month.

Staying small doesn't automatically mean losing the week. Modern Retail reported in 2023 that Earthfoam ran no discounts and still saw sales rise. One example is not a rule, but it is a useful check on the assumption that no discount means no sales.

What can you offer instead of a sitewide discount?

Something that costs less than the discount and points at the second order. The table matches nine incentives to the brands they suit, with a real example of each. Results are noted only where the source reported them, which for most brands it did not.

Most of these were reported by Modern Retail and its DTC briefings, along with a 2023 look at member early access. The big gestures come from Fortune on Patagonia, Retail Dive on REI and on Allbirds, and The Zoe Report on The Ordinary. Lively's CEO described the goal as acquiring customers for the brand.

Some alternatives fail too. The same 2023 Modern Retail piece reported that Anyday's 2022 gift with purchase did not pay off. Sleep on Latex tested a gift card toward a future order and saw no significant holiday lift. An incentive still has to be something the customer actually wants.

Which incentive fits which brand?

Match the incentive to how the product gets bought again. A consumable should reward the next order, a durable should raise the first basket, and a mission brand can use the week to say what it stands for. Use the cohort test to decide how much of a discount, if any, sits underneath.

• Consumables and subscriptions: spread the incentive across the first two or three orders, or pay loyalty points out in January. The Black Friday customer only becomes profitable on order two, so the offer should be about order two.
• Durables with one big purchase: a gift with purchase or a bundle above your average order. There is no second order to aim at soon, so protect the first order's margin.
• Apparel and trained categories: member early access and a clearance edit of last season's stock, with the hero products at full or near-full price.
• Brands with a loyal base: reward the people who already buy, first and best. Bluecore found repeat buyers drove half of enterprise brands' Black Friday sales.
• Mission-led brands: a donation, a closure or a price stance, if the brand has earned it. Patagonia and REI could do it because the stance was already the product.

None of these is free, and the right mix will differ from brand to brand. What they share is that the incentive costs less than a sitewide cut and is built around the customer you want in January. For how to build the rest of the offer, the ten offer rules scored against 1,494 welcome offers covers value before discount, urgency and the second order.

The work after the weekend matters as much as the offer. The December reorder and cross-sell sequence is where a Black Friday customer either becomes a repeat buyer or doesn't. The repeat purchase benchmarks give a baseline, and subscription churn is the number to watch if the offer was a first box.

Questions brands ask
about Black Friday
discounts.