2025 Black Friday trends: Top strategies for peak selling season

In July, we conducted our second annual Black Friday Cyber Monday Trends Survey to understand what strategies and tactics businesses are prioritizing ahead of this year’s peak season. 

You can see a full overview of the results here, but in this post, we’ll get into the finer details of strategies, tools, and best practices to help your business rise to the top this holiday season.

The holiday season represents a major bump in many merchants’ revenue schedules, with 73% of merchants reporting that this period accounts for over 20% of their annual revenue. 

In 2024, Black Friday alone generated $10.8B in revenue, up from $9.8B in 2023. Cyber Monday saw a similar increase as consumers spent $13.3B in ‘24 — up from $12.4B in ‘23. Overall, the holiday season (from November first to December 31st) generated $241.4B in 2024, nearly $20B more than in 2023.

And despite economic uncertainty caused by US tariff changes, Salsify found that 53% of consumers plan on spending the same amount as last year, and 22% plan to spend more.

The TL;DR? Don’t hold back during this peak shopping season. The holiday pie continues to expand, and we’ll do our best to help you take a bigger piece of it.

Important consumer behavior insights from 2024

To set the scene, here are a few stats to keep in mind as you prepare your store:

1. 44% of consumers will start their holiday shopping before November in 2025.
2. 61% of consumers prefer buying from brands that align with their personal values.
3. Mobile device spending accounted for 54.5% of holiday revenue, but desktop conversion rates were higher throughout the season.
4. Buy now, pay later (BNPL) spend increased from $16.6B in 2023 to $18.2B in 2024, and 79% of last year’s BNPL purchases were made on mobile devices. 

Holiday shopping has already started

As we said last year, the time is now — especially because consumers want to spread out their holiday spending in 2025. BazaarVoice’s consumer shopping report found that more shoppers will begin their gift search in September and October, evening out the spread between early shoppers and those who begin shopping in November. 

Personalized marketing helps you stand out from the crowd

That said, even if your holiday deals don’t start soon, you should be preparing with data analysis and customer segmentation: 57% of shoppers would find alerts about deals on products they’ve shown interest in to be “extremely helpful”. 

Personalized deals and product recommendations can set your brand apart — but only if you have the systems in place to automate and execute on those tactics.

Optimize your website for the best possible experience

Mobile devices accounted for 54.5% of holiday spending, but desktop shopping saw higher conversion rates. This means that both versions of your website must be speedy, sleek, and easy to use: don’t give consumers a reason to leave before they even look at your products.

This also applies to your checkout process: make sure you have a variety of payment options available — including BNPL — and make sure all of them are easy for customers to complete on mobile devices.

Tips from our expert ecommerce agencies

In addition to the trends report, we also surveyed 12 certified WooCommerce agencies, asking about preparation timelines and best practices for the holiday shopping season.

They recommend getting started if you haven’t already: 41.7% start preparing clients’ stores three to six months in advance, with larger agencies (and merchants) planning even further ahead. 

Ten out of the twelve agencies agreed that the top three priorities for holiday preparations are: 

1. Conversion rate optimization, 
2. Marketing and promotion setup, 
3. and site speed and performance.

These responses were consistent with the findings of our merchant trends report. Find out how your peers are preparing — all the details are in the sections below.

Website performance optimization (and upgraded hosting)

We noted in the results overview that site performance and hosting were the top upgrades planned for 2025. But, this isn’t just about site speed. Ease of navigation and mobile responsiveness will also play a big role in your holiday season success. 

As we mentioned above, Adobe found that 2024’s mobile device spend was higher, but desktop saw more conversions. Both devices are important and should receive some attention as the holiday season draws near.

Your preparation task list

1. Testing: Test site speed, core web vitals, checkout flows, transaction emails, and any other mission-critical functionality. Run changes on a staging site before taking them live. Everything should be fast, simple, and easy to navigate.
2. Upgrade and migration planning: If you’re thinking of migrating hosts or upgrading your hosting plan before the holiday season, get that underway. Use traffic spikes from previous years (or look at benchmark data for your niche) to predict resource usage for 2025.
3. Measure and optimize: Or, the holiday season might be a good time to gather data and reevaluate. Did the spike in traffic cause all monthly fees to increase, or is it pay by usage?
4. Policies and information: Make sure all of your policy pages (like shipping and returns) are up-to-date to minimize the demand customer questions might place on your support team. Product pages should load quickly and provide answers to all of your customers’ questions.

Hire help for the tough stuff: If you don’t have an in-house engineering team (or if you do and they could use some extra bandwidth), hire a certified Woo Agency Partner for important changes.

From the experts: Focus on security

While security should always be top-of-mind, it’s especially so during peak selling periods: 75% of surveyed agencies reported increased security threats during peak periods, with sophisticated attack patterns emerging.

“Organized crime ramps up at peak [seasons], so any high-profile brands are at increased risk of fraudulent activity or new activity starting.”

— Kanuka Digital

Prepare your site for these common cyber threats:

• Credit card testing and fraud attempts
• Distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks 
• Social engineering attacks
• Bot traffic and spam orders

Increasing inventory

In 2025, 32.6% of merchants plan to increase their inventory. With a surge in visitors (and sales), you don’t want to keep people waiting on backordered products — or prevent a purchase altogether. 

Plan your inventory now to ensure that you have all the stock, shipping supplies, and warehouse space (and personnel) you’ll need before the busy season. 

Your preparation task list

1. Lean in to what already works: Review data from the past 12 months to determine your most popular items. And don’t look only at sales data — your marketing data can be a great informant, too. Look for top-performing emails and social posts, and assess which products are top-of-mind for your most engaged audiences. 
2. Stay informed: On WooCommerce, you can enable low inventory alerts within your product settings.
3. Spread out purchases: Spread out your financial commitment by ordering smaller batches of inventory over the next couple months. If you need financing to meet demand, service providers like Tento are here to help.

Top tools for inventory management

• Back In Stock Notifications: Notify customers when your products are restocked, especially if they weren’t able to purchase as part of your BFCM deals.
• Advanced Notifications: Easily set up new order and stock email notifications for multiple recipients of your choosing.
• Custom Stock Status: Display custom stock statuses to communicate precise information about your stock availability and keep Black Friday customers informed when products are about to sell out.

Adding shipping options

Site performance and increasing inventory were far and away the most popular preparation methods, but third place went to additional shipping options. While only 8.3% of surveyed merchants intend on making changes here, it might be a valuable thing to consider for your business, too.

Shipping benefits, like fast or free shipping, can be powerful motivators for conversion. On the other hand, expensive shipping options will often result in an abandoned cart. 

BazaarVoice found that free shipping is the biggest priority across all ages of shoppers, with half of shoppers aged 18 to 54 being willing to spend more to quality for the perk. 

Others report even higher numbers: DigitalCommerce 360 found that over 81% of consumers consider free shipping their top priority when it comes to order delivery.

Your preparation task list

1. Choose a free shipping strategy: There are multiple ways of offering free shipping that aren’t simply covering the cost. This blog post goes into detail on how to make it work for your business.
2. Know your audience: Review the data from your email list, social media followers, or memberships. Are you able to serve all of the people (and geographies) who are most likely to buy from you?
3. Consider multiple methods: If customers don’t reach your free shipping threshold, it’s important to provide them with options for faster shipping, or lower-cost but slower shipping. 
4. Give customers the info they want: Make sure customers know and have access to their order statuses — both to reduce demand on your support team and to maintain trust and transparency. Transactional emails should include fulfillment and shipping notifications in addition to tracking numbers.

Top tools for shipping and logistics

• WooCommerce Print Invoices and Packing Lists: Generate invoices, packing slips, and pick lists for your WooCommerce orders to help streamline your fulfillment process after the Black Friday and cyber week rush.
• WooCommerce Order Status Manager: Create, edit, and delete completely custom order statuses and integrate them seamlessly into your order management flow to make your customers’ online shopping experience the best it can be.
• Table Rate Shipping: Advanced, flexible shipping with the ability to define multiple shipping rates based on location, price, weight, shipping class, or item count.

Add payment methods

Coming in behind shipping options was payment methods: 5.4% will add more ways to pay in 2025. Hopefully this means more than 90% of our merchants have found a payment mix that works for them, but if you’re still on the fence, take the following into consideration.

As mentioned above, BNPL usage is growing, and frictionless checkout is expected. In 2024, $18.2 billion was spent using buy now, pay later methods — and a massive 79% of that was on mobile devices. 

And it’s not only the usage numbers that you should pay attention to: a 2024 survey from Affirm found that BNPL increases average order value by 60%.

Your preparation task list

1. Make checkout frictionless: Keep your users on-page, and minimize the number of steps it takes to check out. Enable mobile wallet options like Apple Pay or Google Pay (both of which are available in WooPayments) for easy shopping on mobile devices. 
2. Add BNPL: Add at least one BNPL option for customers in your target geos. This provides more financial accessibility during the holiday season and doesn’t add risk for your business. 
3. Test, test, test: Before deploying new payment options, test them on a staging site to make sure no revenue is lost when they’re launched. Then, launch well ahead of the peak season so that any bumps or glitches are found and resolved.

How to choose your new payment methods

Before adding new payment methods to your store, check which options your customers use the most, and which methods you don’t currently offer. When making your choice, consider customer locations, platform processing fees, and platform reviews and reliability. 

Not sure where to start? Check out (pun intended) our full list of payment options, or skip right to buy now, pay later options.

In addition to the preparation trends above, we also asked merchants whether they planned to approach the holiday season differently this year, and 42% of seasonal merchants confirmed a few fun changes:

1. Subscriptions: A few merchants noted new subscription plans, new memberships, and updated options for their existing subscribers. 
2. Infrastructure: Others noted launching an updated website before the busy period — a big project, but likely one that will pay dividends. Hosting upgrades were another popular choice. 

Need a performance upgrade?

Pressable offers free migration to their scalable infrastructure that delivers 100% uptime — the best possible option for a pre-peak hosting change.
From now until September 30, 2025: Get up to $2,500 when migrating your existing WooCommerce store to Pressable Premium.

3. Promotional strategies: Many new promo strategies are on the horizon for our merchants this year, including new and sale-specific product bundles, earlier sales, strategic email list-building, having a bigger social presence, and brand partnerships.

With the above tactics, you’ll be in a good position to have a strong holiday season performance. But why not take it up a notch?

Here are a few statistics to further inform your BFCM sale strategy:

• Email was rated the most effective marketing channel by 23% of merchants, with organic social coming in second at 21.1%.
• The most popular promotional strategies were:
  1. Product bundles (27.4%)
  2. Tiered discounts (18.2%)
  3. Dynamic discounts (16.1%)
  4. Free gifts or add-ons (14.7%)

From the experts: The top new commerce technologies

Our expert agencies were emphatic that merchants should leverage the following technologies as part of their holiday season strategy:

1. Operational AI and workflow automation for efficiency.
2. Cloudflare Turnstile for credit card fraud prevention.
3. Cloudflare waiting rooms for traffic management.
4. Professional VPS-level hosting with proactive site monitoring.
5. Automated testing and staging workflows.
6. Klaviyo for advanced email marketing automation.
7. FunnelKit for WooCommerce conversion optimization.
8. Advanced analytics integration for data-driven decision making.

Whether you’re preparing for the holidays or another peak season, your biggest determiner of success will be the plan you put in place. If you haven’t started planning, it’s time. 

We know it’s a lot to manage. To get you started, consider these tips from our agency partners:

• Finding trends: Cross-reference your previous peak sales periods with search trends to identify your priority products and themes.
• Solving your own pain points: Ask yourself and your team about what was most painful during the last peak period. Analyze the why, and then figure out how to improve. Past challenges or weaknesses can sometimes lead to the biggest gains. 
• Hype up your audience: Build hype for your promotions and brand with password-protected early access campaigns that encourage viral sharing. This takes time, so start early.
• Keep your team in sync: Hold weekly team meetings to review standards and priorities at the beginning of every week. WPBarista does the same: “These meetings become more essential the busier we get.”
• Early is best: Wrap up holiday planning as early as possible — promotions, marketing strategies, and the content to execute.
• Don’t save prep for the holidays: CoSpark recommends turning preparation into a core tenet of your operating model: “Being prepared isn’t a seasonal task for us, it’s how we work all year. We keep sites lean, updated, and performing well all the time, so traffic spikes aren’t a scramble.”

Last year, we also looked at the Woo Marketplace data from the BFCM prep period. These are the extension categories that saw the most installs as stores got ready for their big sales and holiday season:

For many merchants, the holidays are the busy season and it can be tough to stay organized throughout the chaos. The number of ways you could prepare for a peak selling period is nearly limitless. Eventually, all that planning needs to turn into doing. Here are a few ways to get started: