Black Friday 2024 is eight weeks away. Last year, Shopify merchants did $11.5 billion in global sales over BFCM weekend alone — a 24% jump over 2022 — and more than 67,000 merchants hit their single highest-selling day in company history. The merchants who captured that weren’t the ones who started preparing in November. They were the ones who started in October.
Here are the five things that actually matter.
1. Lock Your Inventory Before You Need It
Supply chains don’t care about your promotional calendar. If you’re waiting until November to order stock for a November sale, you’ve already lost. Lead times from suppliers stretch during Q4, shipping costs spike, and the products you need most are exactly the ones everyone else is also scrambling to source.
Audit your best-sellers from last Q4, project demand conservatively, and place orders now. Buffer stock isn’t waste — a stockout during BFCM is. The math is simple: the cost of holding a few extra units is a rounding error compared to losing a sale you can’t fulfill.
2. Make Mobile Your First — and Only — Priority
81% of shoppers planned to use mobile apps during BFCM 2024. Not “also use mobile.” Mobile first, full stop. And more than 40% of online shoppers abandon a site that takes longer than three seconds to load.
Pull up your Shopify store on your phone right now. How long does it take to load? How many taps to checkout? If your honest answer to either question makes you wince, you have eight weeks to fix it — which is plenty of time, but only if you start today. Run a speed audit, compress your images, and walk through your mobile checkout as if you’re a first-time buyer in a hurry. Because during BFCM, every buyer is a first-time buyer in a hurry.
3. Streamline Checkout and Add Buy Now, Pay Later
Cart abandonment is the silent revenue killer of every holiday season. Shoppers who’ve already decided to buy will still bail if your checkout has too many steps, requires account creation, or doesn’t offer the payment method they want.
Reduce your checkout to the fewest steps possible. Offer multiple payment options — credit card, digital wallets, and especially buy now, pay later (BNPL). BNPL is one of the fastest-growing payment methods in ecommerce precisely because it removes the friction of a large holiday purchase. Research shows discounts in the 10–25% range consistently outperform steep price cuts — so a BNPL option at a modest discount often converts better than a 40%-off banner with a clunky checkout.
4. Build Your Promotions Calendar Before November Hits
BFCM is no longer a weekend. It’s a season that kicks off in early November, peaks on Black Friday and Cyber Monday, and runs straight through to Christmas Eve. Merchants who treat it as a weekend campaign leave weeks of revenue on the table.
Map out your full promotional calendar now: which products go on sale and when, when you’ll update your site banners and email campaigns, when ads go live, and — critically — when they stop. A well-timed promotional calendar also lets you stagger your inventory depletion instead of running out of everything on day one. Free shipping as an incentive is worth including: 79% of US shoppers say it makes them more likely to buy online.
5. Automate Your Back Office Before the Volume Hits
This is the one most merchants skip — and the one that costs them the most when November arrives.
A normal month might have 200 orders to reconcile. A BFCM week might have 2,000. Every one of those orders needs to hit QuickBooks correctly: the right revenue account, the right sales tax, the right payment processing fees, the right customer record. If you’re manually entering or batch-importing orders at the end of the month, holiday season turns your back office into a disaster that takes until February to clean up.
Get your Shopify-to-QuickBooks sync automated now, while things are quiet enough to set it up properly. WeIntegrate syncs every Shopify order to QuickBooks in real time as a real Sales Receipt — not a daily summary, not a journal entry — so your books stay current whether you do 50 orders or 5,000 in a week. When the holiday payouts hit your bank account, WeIntegrate automatically creates the matching QuickBooks Deposit with every order linked, every fee recorded, and every discrepancy flagged.
The best time to set this up was before last holiday season. The second best time is right now.
Start Now, Win in November
The merchants who win BFCM don’t outspend everyone else — they out-prepare them. Inventory locked, site optimized, checkout streamlined, promotions scheduled, back office automated. Eight weeks is enough time to do all five. It is not enough time to do them in week eight.
Start your free 15-day trial of WeIntegrate and cross the back-office step off your list today. No credit card required.