The dates first, because everything else counts back from them. Thanksgiving in the United States is Thursday 26 November 2026. Black Friday is Friday 27 November, Small Business Saturday is the 28th, and Cyber Monday is Monday 30 November. Most Shopify merchants now treat it as a six-day event: early access for their best customers on the Tuesday or Wednesday before, the weekend itself, and late offers through the Tuesday after.
It is 23 September as this is published, which gives you nine weeks. Shopify’s own BFCM checklist and most agency guides agree on the shape of that time: the first weeks are for decisions and stock, the middle weeks for building and testing, the last for running. The plan below follows that shape and names the Sidekick skill that does each job, because for a small store the difference between a calm BFCM and a frantic one is how much of the work was done in October.
Weeks 1 and 2 (23 September to 6 October): decide the offers
Start with data, not with a discount percentage. Last November’s sales tell you what people buy from you at this time of year; your margins and stock tell you what you can afford to discount.
Plan my Black Friday to Cyber Monday offers. Pull sales by product for 1 to 30 November last year and this year so far. Check current inventory for the top 20 products and flag anything with fewer than 30 days of cover at last year’s November rate. Using cost per item where set, group products into three tiers: headline (deep discount, high stock, strong margin), supporting (moderate discount), and protect (no discount). Propose a day-by-day calendar from VIP early access through an extension day, with discount type and an email subject per day. Do not create anything.
That is /bfcm-plan, and its output is your working document for the next nine weeks. If you did not trade last November, it builds the plan from your last 90 days and says so.
While you are in the data, run /dead-stock. Products with stock and no sales in 90 days are your clearance tier; BFCM is the best week of the year to turn them back into cash, and a “clearance from 40% off” collection costs you nothing in margin you were ever going to see.
Weeks 3 and 4 (7 to 20 October): stock and suppliers
Supplier lead times are the constraint now. Anything you want on the shelf on 27 November has to be ordered in October, and for products from overseas, possibly this week.
Assuming a supplier lead time of [DAYS] days and a target of 45 days of cover after delivery, calculate reorder quantities from the last 60 days of sales for every variant, adding 20% safety stock for products in the headline tier. Group by vendor with subtotals and draft the supplier email for each.
/restock does this. Tell it to use last November’s rate for the headline products rather than the last 60 days, or you will under-order the things you plan to promote.
Also in these weeks: build the audience you will give early access to. /vip-segment counts customers above a spend threshold, tells you what share of revenue they are, and creates the segment on approval. Early access to a few hundred real customers on the Wednesday before is worth more than any countdown timer.
Weeks 5 and 6 (21 October to 3 November): automations and policies
Order volume during the sale can be three to five times normal, and the two things that go wrong at volume are stockouts you did not see and fraud that shipped. Both are Flow automations, and Sidekick builds them.
- /flow-low-stock emails you when a variant drops below a threshold, once, and resets itself after a restock.
- /flow-fraud-hold puts high-risk orders on hold, tags them and emails you the indicators, so nothing risky auto-fulfils while you are asleep.
Both are created inactive; review them, then switch them on now so they are proven before November.
Then the pages customers read before they buy. /shipping-policy rewrites your shipping page from your real zones and rates; add a holiday cut-off section with the last order dates for delivery before 25 December. /inbox-faq writes instant answers for Shopify Inbox from the same policies, so chat replies stop contradicting the shipping page. If you have never set a returns policy properly, /returns-policy drafts one with the window you choose.
Weeks 7 and 8 (4 to 17 November): build the offers
Now the plan becomes live discounts, collections and emails. The compound-task capability Shopify added to Sidekick in the Summer 2026 Edition makes each tier one approval.
Set up a flash sale on the [TIER COLLECTION] at [PERCENT] off from [START] to [END], shop timezone. Check stock and exclude anything with fewer than 5 units. Check active discounts for overlaps. Plan a hidden sale collection, an automatic discount limited to it with those exact times, and a Shopify Email draft with a subject line, one paragraph in our voice, the product grid and the end time. Show all three, then create them only after I say yes.
Run /flash-sale once per tier and once for the early-access window. Because the discounts are automatic and time-limited, nothing goes live early and nothing runs late; you are not editing prices by hand on Friday morning.
Two supporting jobs in the same weeks. /free-shipping if you are changing the threshold for the season; it recommends a number from your real order sizes. And /campaign-draft for the VIP early-access email, with /subject-lines to pick the pair you will test.
Week 9 (18 to 24 November): test everything
Place a test order through the storefront on your phone. Check the discount applies, the shipping rate is right, the confirmation email reads well, and the tracking link works. Read every sale page as a customer.
Update the announcement bar for the early-access phase with /announce, which writes three lines under 60 characters from your live discounts and shipping promise, so the bar never advertises an offer that is not running.
Turn off anything experimental. This is not the week for a new app or a theme change.
Sale week (25 November to 1 December): run and watch
Your morning routine becomes the sale routine. Every day:
- /orders-today and /unfulfilled first thing.
- /risky-orders daily; the Flow holds the worst cases, a human still reviews.
- /low-stock with a 7-day threshold, so a product that sells out on Friday is pulled from Saturday’s email.
- /wismo for the shipping questions, drafted from each order’s real tracking status.
Phase the offers as planned: early access Tuesday and Wednesday to the VIP segment, the headline tier Friday, supporting tier through the weekend, Cyber Monday’s offer, and one extension day on Tuesday the 1st for the “I missed it” emails. Change the announcement bar as each phase starts.
After (2 to 8 December): learn while it is fresh
Run /weekly-review for sale week against the week before, and /top-products for the 30 days that include the sale. Write down three things: what to reorder for January, what to never discount again because it sold at full price anyway, and which day’s email performed. Next year’s plan starts from those notes, and next year’s /bfcm-plan will read this November’s data automatically.
The short version
- Now: decide offers from last year’s data and current stock; identify clearance.
- October: order stock; build the VIP segment; switch on low-stock and fraud-hold automations; fix shipping, returns and Inbox answers.
- Early November: create each tier as a flash sale in one approval; write the early-access email.
- Week before: test as a customer; update the bar; change nothing else.
- Sale week: the daily routine, phased offers, honest shipping replies.
- After: review, note, reorder.
Every skill named here is in the BFCM 2026 pack, twelve skills that fit inside Sidekick’s 25 slots with room to spare. Add the pack, and October is mostly done.
If you are reading this in November
Nine weeks is the comfortable version. If you have two, do these in order and skip the rest.
- Stock reality. Run
/low-stockwith a 30-day threshold. Whatever cannot be restocked in time is not in the sale; build the offer around what you have. - One headline offer, automatic, time-limited. A single
/flash-saleon your best-stocked sellers is worth more than five tiers you cannot manage. Automatic discounts need no code and cannot be forgotten in a checkout field. - Fraud hold on. Five minutes with
/flow-fraud-hold. Volume brings fraud; a hold costs nothing. - Shipping page and cut-off dates. Customers will ask; the page answers before they do.
- One email to the people who already buy. Skip the segment maths; email everyone who ordered this year with
/campaign-draftand let the subject line do the work.
Everything else, from clearance tiers to early access, is a better-next-year item. Write it down on 1 December while it is fresh, and next September the nine-week version starts from that note.
Numbers worth knowing
Shopify has not published the 2026 dates for its own merchant-wide BFCM results yet, but its guidance is consistent year to year: prep in September and October, run the campaign in November. Shopify’s own checklist covers 25 steps; the plan above is the subset a store with one or two people can actually finish, with Sidekick doing the building.