Page title and paste How to Make Black Friday Profitable

Key takeaways from Beyond the Checkout, Outcraft’s podcast, with Will (Vilius) Nauseda, Co-founder and CEO of Outcraft, and Tomas Raštutis, CEO of Makrii Agency. Watch the episode here.

About this episode

• Podcast: Beyond the Checkout, by Outcraft.
• Speakers: Will (Vilius) Nauseda, Co-founder and CEO of Outcraft; Tomas Raštutis, CEO of Makrii Agency, which runs Meta and Google Ads for ecommerce brands across Europe.
• Topics: Black Friday unit economics, offers that protect profit, calling abandoned checkouts, ad spend, AI creatives, and cash flow after the sale.

Every November, the headlines say the same thing: another record Black Friday. US shoppers spent $11.8 billion online on Black Friday 2025, up 9.1% from the year before, according to Adobe.

In 2024, Black Friday online sales passed $10 billion for the first time, at $10.8 billion. Black Friday 2026 falls on Friday, November 27, and Cyber Monday on November 30.

Before you set your discount, ask the question almost nobody asks on the Monday after: how much of that revenue did you actually keep? Tomas has a story that answers it better than any statistic.

One October, a client came to his agency with their Black Friday offers already built. They only wanted to scale. Halfway through, his team found that the brand had quietly moved fulfillment from Belgium to China without updating anyone on the unit economics.

With that offer and those acquisition targets, every sale was losing about €5. By the time they caught it, spending had already been scaled roughly 8x.

That is the trap of Black Friday: it is very easy to grow yourself into a loss. Check the unit economics before you scale, and scale one decision at a time.

Know Your Numbers Before You Pick a Discount

According to Tomas, the biggest mistake brands make is not understanding their numbers, and Black Friday punishes that harder every year. Ads get more expensive, and competition gets tougher. You used to be able to run a single ad with a discount and get decent results. Now you have to optimize the full funnel—and that starts by knowing your numbers.

Two terms do most of the work here, and they explain why. Unit economics is what one order earns or loses once you count every cost. Gross margin is what is left of the sale price after the product, shipping, and payment fees.

Here is the math Tomas uses. Say your average order value is €100 and your gross margin is 50%, so each order earns €50. A 30% discount sounds modest. It takes €30 off the price, and all €30 comes out of your €50. You have lost 60% of your profit before paying for a single ad.

A discount comes straight out of your margin, so even a small-looking discount can eat up most of your profit and force you to sell far more to break even.

How to work it out for your store: profit lost = discount ÷ margin. Extra orders needed = margin ÷ (margin − discount) − 1.

Read the 30% row again. At a 50% margin, you need 2.5 times your usual orders to earn what you earned without the sale.

Restraint can pay: the less brands discounted, the faster they grew. During BFCM 2025, discounts across Klaviyo brands fell 10% while spending rose 11%, and the brands that discounted least grew fastest, at 14% (Klaviyo).

So, instead of reaching for a bigger percentage, Tomas suggests offers that protect profit per order:

1. Add a gift. It costs you only the gift’s cost price, not a slice of the whole basket.
2. Tier the discount. The more someone spends, the more they save, so average order value rises as the discount increases.
3. Package the value. Tomas pointed to AG1, which sends new subscribers a free welcome kit with their first order: a canister, a scoop, and a shaker. Many of its offers add a set of travel packs too (AG1). It looks generous, it lifts the value of the first order, and it still leaves enough profit to win the customer.

Here is how those offers compare on the same €100 order with a 50% margin. Use the table to see how each option affects profit; the gift and tier values are illustrative:

The gift gives the shopper €5 less in face value than the 30% discount and leaves you with twice the profit.

Knowing your numbers cuts both ways. You scale more safely because you know where you turn unprofitable. And you can scale harder, for the same reason.

Black Friday Is for Winning New Customers

Black Friday is for winning new customers, not for squeezing returning ones. So breaking even on the first order can be a good deal, as long as you know what a customer is worth over time.

To win a Black Friday customer, your customer acquisition cost (CAC) can be no higher than the profit on their first order plus the profit you expect from their next orders.

Here is an illustrative example. A €100 first order at 20% off, with a 50% margin, leaves €30. If 4 in 10 new customers reorder twice, at €50 profit each time, each new customer brings another €40 on average. You can spend up to €70 to win them and still break even.

Supplement brands work this way all the time. First-order profit was never the goal.

But the product has to earn the second purchase. Tomas was blunt: building a big brand on one-time purchases is getting very hard, unless the product is expensive enough to carry it. Even then, people need to like it enough to recommend it.

A weak product can scale for a while, but it won’t last. Win the customer on Black Friday, then make sure the product is strong enough to keep them.

Fix the Leaky Bucket Before Buying More Traffic

Will believes post-purchase is where ecommerce lives or dies now. Before that, though, the question is what happens to the visitors you have already paid for.

Tomas says conversion rate optimization (CRO), the work of making more visitors buy, is usually the least developed part of a brand’s setup. You have bought the visitor, so make sure they can convert.

Then comes his favorite piece of advice: call your abandoned checkouts.

An abandoned checkout is an order where the shopper entered their details at checkout and left without paying. Tomas says these calls convert unusually well because the shopper already tried to buy and stopped at the last step.

The second benefit is just as valuable. Every call gives you the shopper’s own words about why they bought or didn’t. You can feed those words straight back into your ads, creatives, and landing pages, and answer objections before they come up.

This is the idea behind Outcraft’s conversation intelligence. Every conversation is recorded and transcribed, then given an AI summary and a quality score, so you can see which objections come up most. Will explained that abandonment often has a clear, fixable cause.

The shopper didn’t understand the shipping time, or saw one price on the product page and a higher one at checkout. If a fifth of the people you talk to have the same problem, you know exactly what to fix.

The same applies after delivery. If a customer says they forgot to use the product, that is an onboarding gap, and they are unlikely to reorder.

Outcraft does this at scale. It calls the shopper within minutes of an abandoned checkout and asks what stopped them. It answers from the store’s policies and product details, then sends a checkout link by SMS or WhatsApp during the call.

Don’t overlook email and SMS either. Tomas calls them one of the cheapest ways to turn a first-time buyer into a loyal customer. He says they drive much of a brand’s profit, beyond the revenue they bring in. Too many brands set them up once and forget them.

On pop-ups, he believes Black Friday is for capturing demand that already exists. List building should happen all year, so he wouldn’t push aggressive pop-ups during the event itself.

Overspending Is Easier Than Underspending

This lesson comes from experience. At the end of 2024, Tomas’s agency took over a client whose previous agency had scaled fourth-quarter spend to roughly a million a month, at a negative profit. The budget had been spread across channels with no strategy.

In a single month, by cutting spending, Makrii doubled the client’s profit, and revenue went up too.

Tomas also reminded us that savings work harder than revenue. A euro you save goes straight to profit. A euro of new revenue only adds to your margin:

At a 40% margin, every €1,000 you cut from a supplier bill is worth €2,500 in extra sales.

So renegotiate before Black Friday. If you know a big event is coming, you can get better terms from your third-party logistics provider (3PL) and a better unit price from manufacturers on a larger order.

For more on where ad spend leaks after the sale, see why ROAS doesn’t end at checkout.

AI Creatives and Meta: Helpful, With Limits

On AI creatives, Tomas’s view is that volume was never the answer; quality was. Pumping out more AI ads on a weak creative strategy only wastes more spend.

With a strong strategy and a clear hypothesis, AI gives you cheap early tests. You see what works, then invest in real footage and user-generated content (UGC) creators for the winners.

It also avoids a common trap: spending heavily on production, then feeling you have to put big ad spend behind it whether it works or not. He added that European audiences tend to respond better to considered creatives than to random tests.

On Meta, Tomas expects every algorithm improvement to come with higher prices. There is a window of advantage while the algorithm improves. In his view, though, it only gets harder from here, and a poor funnel with a poor ad won’t hold up for much longer.

The January Bills Will Hurt

This was Tomas’s main message for anyone listening. Black Friday doesn’t end that weekend, or even in the fourth quarter, and many of the highest costs arrive afterward.

In Europe, plenty of brands get caught out by VAT bills they forgot about. US brands face the same with sales tax they collected and still have to pay.

Brands hire seasonal staff and forget the fixed costs that come with them. And stock that sold out at lower margins has to be reordered.

All of it lands in January, usually a brand’s quietest month.

“Cash flow is the biggest destroyer of brands during this period,” says Tomas. His fix is to negotiate payment terms before reaching for a loan.

Manufacturers and agencies don’t usually struggle with cash flow, but ecommerce brands do. So you might offer to pay a little more per unit, say €1.05 instead of €1, in exchange for an extra 30 days to pay.

Know what that costs before you sign. Paying 5% more for 30 extra days is expensive credit, about 61% a year:

Formula: yearly cost ≈ price increase × 365 ÷ extra days.

So longer terms pay off only when those 30 days of cash earn you more than the extra you pay, for example, by funding ads that pay back within the month. Compare the cost with your loan rate first. Loans still work, especially for inventory, but negotiate the terms first.

Tomas left two last warnings. Don’t get your ad account banned or your funds frozen; both are much harder to recover from than most people expect.

And, as he tells his clients, don’t multiply by zero. You have built a business, so don’t risk all of it on one huge move. It is easier to keep scaling if you scale in steps.

Three Things to Do Before November 27

1. Know your unit economics before you choose a Black Friday offer. Check your fulfillment costs, then design gifts and tiers that protect profit per order.
2. Convert the traffic you already have before buying more. Fix your funnel and call your abandoned checkouts before paying for more clicks.
3. Plan your cash for January before Black Friday starts. Budget for VAT or sales tax, seasonal costs, and restocking, and negotiate payment terms early.

Questions From the Episode

When is Black Friday 2026?

Black Friday 2026 is on Friday, November 27, and Cyber Monday is on November 30. Many brands start their offers earlier in November, so set your offer and check your numbers before mid-month.

How much profit does a 30% Black Friday discount cost?

At a 50% margin, a 30% discount removes 60% of your profit on each order, so you need 150% more orders to earn the same profit. At a 40% margin, the same discount removes 75% of your profit.

What can you offer instead of a bigger discount?

Tomas recommends offers that protect profit per order: a gift with purchase, a tiered discount that rewards bigger baskets, or a package that adds value without cutting the price. On a €100 order with a 50% margin, a gift that costs you €10 leaves €40 of profit, against €20 after a 30% discount.

Should you break even on Black Friday orders?

Breaking even on the first order is fine when the product earns repeat orders, because Black Friday is for winning new customers. The most you can spend to win one is the profit on their first order plus the profit you expect from their next orders.

Why call abandoned checkouts during Black Friday?

Calling an abandoned checkout reaches a shopper who already tried to buy, and the call tells you in their own words what stopped them. Those words help you fix the checkout, the offer, and the ads for every shopper who comes after.

What costs hit after Black Friday?

VAT or sales tax payments, the fixed costs of seasonal staff, and restocking items that sold out at lower margins usually land in January, often a brand’s quietest month. Plan for the cash before Black Friday starts.

Watch the Full Conversation

Catch the full episode of Beyond the Checkout on Outcraft’s YouTube channel. Here’s an interesting bit of news while you do!

Outcraft is offering 50% off your first two months with code BFCM26, valid until December 4, 2026. For more offers from ecommerce tools, see our list of Black Friday software deals, or read how Outcraft works.

Sources: Adobe, 2025 Holiday Shopping Recap; Klaviyo, BFCM 2025 recap (December 2, 2025); AG1 first-order offer pages. All other points are from the Beyond the Checkout episode.