Black Friday Cyber Monday Offer Plan (US)

The Black Friday Cyber Monday weekend is the one stretch of the US retail year where almost every store runs an offer at the same time, so the plan matters more than the discount. This Black Friday Cyber Monday offer plan gives you the dates for 2026 and 2027, a timeline from eight weeks out through the Monday itself, a day-by-day sequence tied to named offers, and the numbers to watch afterward. The 2026 season is close: if you are reading this in October 2026, you are already inside the eight-week window, so use the schedule below as a compressed version this year and as the full version for 2027.

The dates

Thanksgiving is the anchor. The federal holiday statute, 5 U.S.C. 6103, sets Thanksgiving Day as the fourth Thursday in November, and the Office of Personnel Management's federal holiday list shows Thursday, Nov. 26 for 2026 and Thursday, Nov. 25 for 2027. The rest follows from that one date.

Where each date comes from matters, because only some are written down by a government source:

• Thanksgiving is statutory and appears in the OPM list for both years.
• Black Friday and Cyber Monday are computed here from Thanksgiving. We found no government or statutory definition of either term, so treat the dates as the conventional ones: the Friday after Thanksgiving and the Monday after that weekend.
• Small Business Saturday is listed by the Small Business Administration as Saturday, Nov. 28, 2026. The SBA page says American Express founded it in 2010 and that the SBA has co-sponsored it since 2011. We did not find a 2027 date on the SBA page, so the 2027 entry is the Saturday after Thanksgiving by the same pattern. Confirm it when the SBA publishes next year's date.

For scale, Shopify reported in an SEC filing dated Dec. 2, 2025 that its merchants made 14.6 billion dollars in sales over the 2025 Black Friday Cyber Monday weekend, up 27 percent from 2024 (24 percent on a constant currency basis), with an average cart of 114.70 dollars. Shopify defined the weekend as running from early Friday in New Zealand to late Monday in California. Those are platform-wide figures; use them to see that the weekend is large, not to set a target for your store.

Eight weeks out: stock, gift inventory, thresholds

Count back from Black Friday. For 2026 that is Oct. 2, and for 2027 it is Oct. 1. In a normal year this is when you decide what you are going to do and order what you need.

1. Pick the offers. Decide the one or two offers you will run, and the margin each can afford. The break-even table in Break-Even Discount: Extra Volume You Need tells you how much extra volume a percentage discount needs; a gift costs the same fixed amount whatever the cart size, which is a different shape.
2. Order gift stock. Count the gifts you could give away in the worst case, not the average. Shopify's Buy X get Y help says free products need adequate inventory and that a free product at zero inventory shows as sold out, so customers cannot use the discount. A gift that runs out mid-Friday ends your offer early.
3. Set thresholds from your own data. Look at last November's order values and at normal weeks. The first gift tier belongs a little above your typical basket, the way a free shipping line does (see Free Shipping Threshold: The Formula).
4. Check the shipping promise. Whatever you say about delivery dates has to survive the volume of the weekend. Decide your last-order dates after you read the carriers' published schedules, below.

If you are reading this in October 2026 and have already passed the eight-week mark, skip to step 2 and work with what is in the warehouse. Gift stock and thresholds are the two items you cannot fix in the last week.

The weeks leading in

For 2027 shift every date by the difference in the calendar: Black Friday is Nov. 26, 2027, so the week of begins Monday, Nov. 22.

The week of: offer sequence by day

One offer per day with a clear end beats a wall of simultaneous promotions. The table uses the exact template names in Freebies Engine by Log Studio Lab. The days follow the 2026 calendar.

Notes on three entries. The Progress bar is described in the template list as showing "how close the cart is to a reward", which is the right companion to a tiered gift. The Campaign code is described as a code that "only works from a tagged link", so you can give your email list something others cannot find. Thanksgiving itself is a deliberate gap in this sketch; whether your customers shop that day is something your own order history can tell you.

Gift tiers vs flat discounts in BFCM

Two offers, compared with stated assumptions, not benchmarks. Assume a 50 percent gross margin and a 100 dollar cart.

• A flat 20 percent off: it costs 20 dollars on the 100 dollar cart, which is 40 percent of the 50 dollars of margin. By the formula in the break-even post, it needs 20 ÷ (50 − 20) = 66.7 percent more volume just to match the profit you would have had.
• Two gifts at 5 dollars landed cost each: it costs 10 dollars, or 20 percent of that margin, and it costs the same 10 dollars if the cart is 200 dollars.

What the comparison shows: the flat discount costs more as carts grow, while the gift's cost is capped by its price and by your stock. It does not show that gifts win, since a gift needs to be something shoppers want, and a 20 percent discount is simple to understand. Gift tiers also let the weekend lift the basket: "spend 100 dollars, get one gift; spend 150, get two" gives shoppers a reason to add a product, and the template's example, 50 dollars for one gift and 100 dollars for two, shows the shape. Pick spend levels from your own data.

One legal note for any of this. The FTC's guide on the word "free" (16 CFR 251.1) says the terms of a "free" offer should be set out clearly and conspicuously at the outset, and a footnote reached by an asterisk does not count. Put the tier thresholds in the banner itself. This is not legal advice.

Carrier cutoffs after Cyber Monday

The weekend ends on Cyber Monday, but the delivery promise does not. USPS, UPS and FedEx each publish their own holiday shipping deadlines for the season, and the dates change from year to year. This post does not quote any: take your last-order dates for each service level from the carriers' own pages once they are posted, and put them next to the offer as soon as you know them. If you promise delivery before Dec. 25, the cutoff is a business rule for the store, and the banner should say the date.

What to measure afterward

Pull these from your own orders within a week of Cyber Monday, before you plan the next promotion:

• Gift cost per order and in total, against the margin of the orders that earned a gift.
• The share of orders that earned each tier, and how many sat just under it. A tier nobody reaches is dead weight; a tier everybody reaches is a cost.
• Average order value, compared with the weeks before, rather than with a number from another store.
• Gifts that ran out, and the hour each one did.
• Returns in the following weeks, because a gift offer that brings returns costs more than the gift.

Write the results down with the offer terms. In 2027 you will start from them.

Setting up gift tiers

The Gift tiers template in Freebies Engine by Log Studio Lab is described as "More spent, more gifts, in as many steps as you like." Set the first step from your data, add the second a visible stretch above it, and make sure the gift stock covers the highest plausible number of takers. Combine it with a progress bar so shoppers see the next step. See the pricing page for plan requirements.