How Much to Discount on Black Friday 2026: Pricing Strategy

Most DTC brands should headline Black Friday at 20% to 30% off for subscribers who have never bought, keep existing customers on a shallower price cut or a non-price reward, and put the deepest discount on a handful of high-margin or overstocked products. In 2025 the average discount across ecommerce fell to 26.2% while sales grew. Here is how to set your number.

What the 2025 data says about how deep discounts actually went

Start with what happened, not with what a competitor's banner says. Klaviyo's analysis of BFCM 2025 found the average discount across ecommerce fell to 26.2% from 29.1% the year before, and that none of the big deal days topped a 30% average (Klaviyo BFCM 2025 trends, 2 December 2025). Sales did not fall with the discounts. Klaviyo-attributed revenue rose 27% to more than $3.8 billion, Black Friday became the first single day over $1 billion on the platform, and the brands offering the smallest discounts grew fastest, up 14% year over year (Klaviyo BFCM 2025 report, 2 December 2025).

Salesforce's most recent published discount rate is from Cyber Week 2024: a global average of 26% and a US average of 28%, both down a point from the year before (Salesforce, 4 December 2024). Its 2025 release did not restate the rate but did report that the average selling price across Cyber Week rose 6% year over year (Salesforce, 5 December 2025). Adobe's read on the season was that US retailers "leaned heavily on discounts" to drive online demand, with electronics peaking at 31% off and furniture at 19% (Adobe Analytics, 2 December 2025).

Put those together and the market average for a DTC brand sits in the mid-20s, with category ceilings from the high teens to the low 30s. Our Black Friday marketing strategy post covers the category ceilings and the economics of discount-led growth in detail (why discount-led growth can hide weak economics); this post is about choosing your own number inside those bounds.

What shoppers say they expect, and why not to take it at face value

Survey data pulls the other way, and it is worth understanding why before you react to it. BCG's survey of more than 10,000 consumers across ten countries found that shoppers consider "at least 30% off" a good deal, and that 77% delay purchases earlier in the year to wait for Black Friday promotions (BCG, 3 November 2025). Deloitte's US survey found 38% of shoppers planned to buy only items at least 50% off, and 60% had already put items in carts to buy during BFCM (Deloitte, 24 November 2025).

So shoppers say 30% to 50% and the market delivered 26%. Both are true, and the gap is the whole pricing strategy. Shoppers answer surveys about the headline number they notice, which is the deepest discount on the page. Brands report the blended average across everything they sold. The way to satisfy both is to run a deep, visible discount on a small set of products that can carry it, and a shallower sitewide or segment-specific offer everywhere else.

That is also why the 60% who have pre-loaded carts matter more than the 38% who say they want half off. A shopper with your product in their cart on 20 November has already decided to buy from you. The question is only whether you hand them 25 points or 45. The abandonment flow, not the sitewide banner, is where that decision gets made, and it should be sale-aware before the weekend starts.

The decision table: depth by segment and AOV band

Klaviyo's 2025 data gives the only public evidence we have found on depth by price point: low-AOV brands saw the strongest open rates when discounting in the 20% to 29% range, while mid- and high-AOV brands performed best at 30% to 39% (Klaviyo, why big results do not need big discounts, 2 December 2025). The table below combines that with the segment logic that keeps margin on the customers who already pay full price.

Two caveats before you apply it. The bands are starting points calibrated to the 2025 market average, not rules; a brand with 80% gross margin can go deeper in every cell than one at 45%. And AOV here means your average order value at full price, not the discounted basket, so read the column that matches what customers pay in October.

Two rules make the table work. The headline discount, the one in the banner and the subject line, is the hero-SKU number, capped by units so it ends when you say it ends. The blended discount, the one that hits your P&L, is driven by rows 1 to 4 and should land near or below the 26% market average. If you cannot vary the offer by segment in your email and SMS platform, you are running row 1's depth for row 3's customers, and the margin math in the next section shows what that costs.

The margin math most brands skip

Take a product that lists at $100 with a 60% gross margin, so cost of goods is $40. At 25% off you collect $75 and keep $35 of gross profit before shipping, payment fees and any acquisition cost. At 40% off you collect $60 and keep $20. Moving from 25% to 40% cuts gross profit per order by 43%, which means you need 75% more orders at the deeper discount just to stand still. Klaviyo's finding that the smallest discounters grew fastest in 2025 suggests you will not get them.

Now apply the same arithmetic to an existing customer. Every ten points of discount you hand to someone who would have paid full price is $10 of gross profit gone on a $100 order, a sixth of the margin, for no incremental behavior. Ometria found that 55% of Black Friday 2025 revenue came from existing customers (Ometria, 12 December 2025). If more than half your weekend revenue is people who already buy from you, the depth you offer them is the single largest lever on your BFCM profit, and it is the one most brands never touch because a sitewide code cannot tell them apart.

The third term in the equation is the repeat purchase, and it is where deep-discount acquisition quietly fails. Ometria's data shows only 4% of Black Friday 2024 new customers bought again within 12 months, that those customers were six times less likely to return than a typical new customer, and that just 11% of 2024 Black Friday shoppers came back for Black Friday 2025. A 40% first order with a 4% chance of a second is an expensive way to acquire an email address. Bain's Fred Reichheld put the other side of the ledger in one sentence: "In financial services, for example, a 5% increase in customer retention produces more than a 25% increase in profit" (Bain & Company, Prescription for Cutting Costs). The discount buys the first order. Retention decides whether it was worth buying.

If you want to see what a change in repeat rate does to your own numbers, our free LTV tool will run it for you (run the numbers in our LTV tool), and our customer lifetime value post explains which inputs matter (customer lifetime value for DTC brands).

Want the depth-by-segment table built into your Klaviyo or Attentive account before November? See how we run BFCM for DTC brands (BFCM marketing for DTC brands)

How long the discount should run

Depth and duration trade against each other, and in 2025 the market chose duration. Klaviyo's data shows discount rates peaked at roughly 28% on Small Business Saturday in the US, against about 24% on Thanksgiving and 26% on Black Friday, with no day averaging above 30%. Shopify's merchants sold $14.6 billion over the weekend at an average cart of $114.70 (Shopify, 2 December 2025), and across Ometria's retailers the Saturday after Black Friday grew 20% to become the second-largest revenue day. The weekend is now five days with two peaks, and a shallower offer held across all five outsells a deeper one compressed into 48 hours.

The trap in a longer window is the extension. A deadline that moves teaches your list that every deadline moves, and it costs you every campaign for the rest of the year. Set the window in October, tell the list when it ends in the save-the-date email, and end it. If you want to keep selling on Tuesday, change the offer shape (a single category, a single bundle) rather than extending the same code, which our Cyber Monday email post covers as the extension send (the Cyber Monday extension send).

The other lever is the early-access window. Opening the sale to subscribers on the Wednesday before Thanksgiving at the same depth, not a deeper one, spreads volume across more days, rewards the list, and gives you 36 hours of conversion data before the public launch. The send-by-send version is in our Black Friday email sequence (Black Friday email sequence).

Five pricing mistakes that show up every Black Friday

A sitewide percentage as the whole strategy. It is the easiest to build and the most expensive to run, because it gives row 3 customers row 1 depth and puts your best-margin products on sale alongside your overstock. Use it only as the shallow floor under a segmented structure.

Discounting VIPs. The customers who bought three times this year at full price will buy on Black Friday at 10% off or at early access with a gift. Giving them 30% is the largest avoidable margin loss of the weekend, and it also trains them to wait for November.

Going deeper on Cyber Monday. Monday's shoppers have already seen your Friday offer. A deeper cut on Monday punishes everyone who bought on Friday and teaches the list to wait. Change the shape of the Monday offer, not the depth; our Cyber Monday marketing ideas post has fourteen ways to do that (Cyber Monday marketing ideas).

Letting codes stack. A 25% sitewide code that stacks with a 15% welcome code and a loyalty redemption is a 40% discount you did not plan. Audit code combinability in October.

Anchoring to the competitor's banner. The competitor's 50% is a hero SKU with a unit cap, exactly as the table above recommends. Matching it sitewide is matching their headline with your blended average.

What spreading the offer instead of deepening it did for Spoonful of Comfort

Spoonful of Comfort sells soup and comfort-food gifts, a category where a deep discount on a gift reads as cheapening the gift. For BFCM 2025 the program replaced compressed urgency with an extended promotional window: early access for subscribers before Black Friday, messaging distributed across weeks, AI-assisted segmentation to decide who saw which offer, and sale-aware automation so the abandonment flows carried the live offer. Depth was held; duration and targeting did the work.

Email and SMS revenue during BFCM rose 196.9% year over year, owned channels produced 46.1% of total BFCM revenue, and the brand finished Q4 up 25% year over year (Spoonful of Comfort BFCM case study). A different kind of proof comes from Darc Sport, an apparel brand built on product drops, where scarcity does the work a discount would otherwise do and SMS carries the launch at $7.89 in revenue per campaign message sent (Darc Sport SMS results). Neither brand won the weekend by being the deepest discount in the inbox. The lesson generalizes. Depth is the lever every competitor can pull on the same morning; duration and targeting are levers most of them cannot, because they require a list that was warmed in October and segments that were built before the sale.

Where the number goes once you have it

The depth table is an input, not a plan. It feeds three things. The offer types that carry each depth, from bundles and tiered spend-and-save to loyalty-gated pricing, are in our Black Friday marketing ideas post (Black Friday marketing ideas that protect margin). The sends that deliver each offer to each segment at the right hour are in the Black Friday email sequence linked above. And the subscription or loyalty offers that turn a discounted first order into a recurring one are in our post on Black Friday loyalty and subscription offers (Black Friday loyalty and subscription offers).

Set the number in October, freeze it two weeks out, and measure it in January by segment, not by the weekend total. The weekend total will look good either way. The segment view tells you whether you bought growth or gave it away.

One more use for the number. Put the blended-discount target in front of whoever approves the campaign in October, alongside last year's actual. Most brands discover at that point that last year's blended discount was ten points deeper than the headline they remember, because the codes stacked and the VIPs received the prospect offer.

Frequently asked questions

How much should you discount for Black Friday? For subscribers who have never bought, 20% to 30% depending on your average order value. For existing customers, 10% or a non-price reward such as early access or a gift. For a few hero or overstocked products, up to 40% with a unit cap. The 2025 market average across ecommerce was 26.2%.

Is 30% off a good Black Friday deal? Yes, to shoppers. BCG's 2025 survey found consumers consider at least 30% off a good deal. It is also above the 26.2% average brands actually offered in 2025, so a 30% headline on a capped set of products satisfies the expectation without setting your blended discount there.

How do I protect margin during Black Friday? Vary depth by segment, so existing customers do not receive the discount designed for prospects; cap the deepest discount by units; block code stacking; and hold the window rather than deepening it. Then measure revenue by segment in January, not just the weekend total.

Should Cyber Monday discounts be deeper than Black Friday? No. A deeper Monday discount penalizes Friday buyers and teaches the list to wait. Change the shape of the Monday offer, not the depth.

Should I use tiered discounts, bundles or a flat percentage? Tiered spend-and-save and bundles let you control which products carry the margin hit and raise average order value; a flat percentage does neither. Use the flat percentage only as a shallow floor under a segmented structure.

Not sure what your blended discount actually was last year? Request a complimentary BFCM audit and we will pull it by segment (Get my complimentary BFCM audit)