Let’s face it, there is a lot of hype around Black Friday and thousands of businesses have sales over this period every year. But how much money can you expect from Black Friday Sales?

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Black Friday Sales

In our experience, and anecdotally what we’ve heard from other businesses: sales for the one weekend will approximately account for 25-75% of your total November monthly revenue. Some sites that ran a Black Friday sale for the first time saw their total November sales double.

According to Adobe Analytics data, the five-day 2021 holiday shopping spree from Thanksgiving Thursday to Cyber Monday saw U.S shoppers spent $ 33.9 billion online. That’s up 19% for the same holiday weekend in 2019.

Breaking down these 2021 numbers, Cyber Monday topped with $ 10.7 billion. This was followed closely by Black Friday with $ 8.9 billion in generated revenue.


Other considerations to remember

For products with annual subscriptions or renewals, there are other factors to consider. On the positive side, remember that many of the people purchasing this year will renew next year, bringing in even more revenue. Several times per year, our Paid Memberships Pro plugin sees bumps in daily sales numbers from sales we ran in the past.

This is a chart of Paid Memberships Pro 2018 revenue and the bump seen during the month of November during the Black Friday and Cyber Monday sales.

On the negative side, remember that an increase in sales will bring an increase in support. Physical products will need to be packaged and shipped. Also note that refunds will happen at the same rate they usually do, or maybe a little bit more.

A typical BFCM discount could be as high as 50%. At that discount, you’ll need 2x the regular number of sales to break even, 3x to make 50% more and 4x to double your revenue during the sale.

You can read more about “How Do I Run a Sale Without Losing Money?” here.


Sitewide Sales

You won’t know how much your particular store is capable of making during a sitewide sale until you try it.

With a tool like the Sitewide Sales plugin for WordPress, you can have your BFCM sale up and running in one hour or less. The plugin will track your sales and let you know how well it performed. If it doesn’t go well, you will have learned something and don’t have to run those sales any more. If it does go well, it could mean thousands and thousands of EXTRA dollars for you every year.


How much extra money, you ask?

Use this tool to calculate how much of a revenue “bump” you can expect by running a Black Friday sale.

Black Friday Sales Calculator


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Adjust the values to get your Black Friday revenue estimate.