The 12 BFCM Tips of Christmas from 9-Figure Operators

If you’ve never heard of The Operators Podcast, you’re missing out. The hosts represent 9-figure ecommerce brands Ridge Wallets, Simple Modern, Hexclad, Pela Case and LOMI, sharing insights from the front lines every week. And every year they do a banger episode around BFCM strategies that work.

What gets us really excited is how our market competitive intelligence dataset can support you in planning for and implementing these tips before and during peak season.

Check out their tips, and how to use ShopVision in your holiday ops.

1. Have a backup promotion (and creative)

You can prepare for holiday, but not predict it. Having backup promotions prepared and ready to go ensures you can respond quickly if things aren’t going to plan.

This goes both ways: sweeter deals if you’re missing your numbers, or worse offers if you’re selling too fast and can preserve margin with a clawback deal.

Of course, it always helps to have your eye on the market. Was your headline offer on par with your peers? Your customers may be subscribed to competitor emails, follow them on social, or discover their deals through digital marketing.

How ShopVision supports backup promotional strategy

1. Run a retro analysis prompt on your peers’ Holiday 2025 promotions. While some brands may switch up their offers, you’ll get a baseline of how your market moved and what to expect. The best predictor of future behavior is relevant, past behavior. Backup offers that ‘match the market’ are levers to pull mid-season.
2. Prompt for creative ideas. Your backup offers need backup assets. ShopVision captures every email, social post, SMS campaign, Google and Meta ad, and homepage screenshot for inspiration. You can browse the library for inspiration in ShopVision Explorers, or have the Agent analyze and surface the most relevant holiday campaign references in minutes.

Sample prompt:

Compare our competitor's holiday 2025 headline offers to ours. Give us ideas for both better and worse 'backup offers' that we could prepare for 2026.

Want to see what top brands in your market did across Holiday 2025 right now? Check out our industry-scoped Black Friday Benchmark reports.

2. Launch deals early

People shop “way earlier than you think.” Many brands think “we only have to discount on Black Friday.” That’s a fair brand and finance decision. But when your market moves early on deals and discounts while you stay full price, you risk ceding that early demand.

Across our Black Friday Benchmark reports, we’ve observed that starting early is table stakes: very few brands hold out until Black Friday proper. Getting an at-a-glance view of sale opening dates gives you perspective, and can help you decide whether to bump your event ahead versus last year.

In ShopVision, you can prompt for this through the Agent, or use our Claude MCP connector to build beautiful charts using your company’s design system and branding.

Sample prompt:

Tell me when our competitors launched Black Friday sales in 2025: how many days early, the headline offer, and if they offered early access to email subscribers or loyalty members

3. Have a unique Cyber Monday offer (or don’t)

The panel is divided on whether to run varied offers across the BFCM weekend to keep people coming back, or run a simple, easy-to-understand offer that removes the friction and FOMO of “I just read the email from two days ago, and that deal is already gone” (as well as the confusion that can come with constantly rotating promotions).

There’s no right or wrong answer. Across our Black Friday Benchmark reports, we found unique Cyber Monday offers less common than consistent headlines across the weekend. But a few industries stood out, including outdoor apparel’s flash sale trend, and women’s contemporary fashion’s various Cyber Monday pivots.

Scoping out what your peers did can give you ideas to test, or what backup offers to consider if Black Friday and Cyber weekend sales were too slow (or too hot).

Sample prompt:

Who ran a completely different Cyber Monday offer from Black Friday in 2025, and what were the details?

Bonus tip: To gauge what offers work and underperform across your peers, compare year-over-year promotional calendars. ShopVision’s agent can summarize what sticks around, what changes, and what that might signal for campaign performance.

4. Spend into the conversion lag before the weekend

Translation: increase ad spend before the period when you expect purchases to peak, because some of the shoppers you reach today won’t convert for several days. This is especially important for higher-consideration purchases, where shoppers need more time between discovery and purchase.

For more impulse-driven products, the strategy may be the opposite: hold back some budget and ramp up during the peak itself, when shoppers are more likely to discover and convert within a much tighter window.

This year, you can track how your competitors are building momentum before BFCM with ShopVision’s new Impression Rank feature. In Ads Explorer, you can sort a brand’s live Meta ads by relative impression volume, see when each creative first appeared, how long it has been running, and how its rank is changing week over week.

If a competitor’s recently launched creative starts climbing the ranks well ahead of the weekend, or an existing ad suddenly gains momentum, it can be a signal that the brand is leaning into demand generation before conversions peak.

You can browse this directly in Ads Explorer, or bring Impression Rank into an agent prompt to analyze which competitors and creatives are gaining the most reach, when that momentum started, and whether the pattern looks different across brands.

Sample prompt:

What were [brand]’s top ads by Impression Rank this week?

* Impression Rank is a new feature in ShopVision. In addition to live campaign analysis, you can use it for any retrospective period starting July 2026 onwards to plan upcoming tentpole events.

5. Send MORE email

“Whatever you sent last year, send more. This is like the one time of year you have permission to be annoying as a brand. And too many people think ‘I can't send four emails in a day.’ Yes, you can. It's one time a year. You have full permission from everyone to send more email.”

You may be surprised how frequently (or infrequently) your peers send emails across the Black Friday ramp, Cyber 5, and post-CM windows. Our BFCM Benchmark Reports show that most markets typically have only a few aggressive senders, with most brands sending at least one email per day.

Resending to non-openers was surprisingly underleveraged in some markets like performance running. During peak season, inboxes fill fast. It’s a quick win to bump higher in message order throughout the days and hours that matter most.

Other markets, like casual footwear, show more resend trends.

With ShopVision’s agent, you can drill into how aggressive senders structured their campaigns. For example, White Fox Boutique sent 5 discrete countdown emails for its early access event on November 24.

Sample prompt:

Review our competitors’ emails between Black Friday and Cyber Monday 2025, rank brands by aggressiveness. For brands that sent more than 3 creatives on any single day, show us their strategy.

Tip: Use ShopVision’s Claude MCP server to create beautiful heatmaps and email send frequency charts with your design system and branding.

6. Experiment with bigger bundles

“The best Black Friday offers don't just increase orders, they increase AOV. A couple years in a row or a few years in a row, we've just come up with bigger and bigger bundles. It's shocking how many people like buy these massive bundles. So, I would just say, when you're looking at an offer, make sure you're thinking about increasing AOV.”

Not every industry lends itself easily to bundling. But if you’re in casual men’s fashion, beauty, haircare, intimate apparel, or cookware, your product team can really get creative with holiday focused sets.

For some verticals like haircare, gift sets and bundled SKUs get their own promotional events and merchandising features.

Of course, bundles are often planned far in advance. But you still might want to keep an eye on new holiday drops for your own positioning and offers throughout the current season.

Sample prompt (advanced planning):

Which competitors promoted bundled SKUs or bundle offers in marketing channels on Black Friday, and who had the most creative and varied bundled product strategies?

Sample prompt (this season):

Have any of our competitors launched holiday bundle sets in the last 30 days?

Bonus tip: Seeing the what-and-when of gift sets across the market is one aspect of market competitive intelligence for product teams. Another is which products were successful. With ShopVision Catalog and Pricing Intelligence, you can track sell through and markdown schedules across bundled SKUs to gauge relative demand and performance of holiday gift bundles.

7. Do more gifts with purchase

Like bundles, GWP is more common across some verticals than others. But even something like a gift bag can add huge perceived value and function as its own offer.

“It acts as a promo. It acts as another reason to purchase. And Ridge was built on what we call no-brainer offers. It's like an offer so good, you wouldn't want to buy from anywhere else. Gift with purchase helps you complete that.”

In our Benchmark reporting, we found heavy GWP behavior across categories like skincare, beauty, haircare, and accessible jewelry. But the gifts themselves fell in buckets. For example, in skincare: full size products, deluxe minis or samples, and even hard good accessories like travel totes that are not part of the catalog.

You may find yourself in a market, like beauty, where rotating GWP offers are common. With ShopVision, your product development team can track what gifts with purchase are offered, your merchandising team can assess at what minimum spend qualified shoppers for the gift, and marketing knows exactly when those campaigns hit inboxes, socials, and homepages.

Sample prompt:

Review which gift with purchase offers competitors ran last holiday. Who had the most creative and varied GWP strategies? Compare them to our own. What should we consider next season?

8. Blow out your best stuff

“BFCM is a time to sell a ton of your best stuff.” It’s easy to focus on reducing overstocked inventory and dressing up your existing sale section as a Black Friday event, while keeping your hero products full price.

But that strategy can underperform when the largest traffic spike arrives to find your sale section populated by off-season goods with spotty size availability. Paid traffic converts lower. Brand fans are disappointed. Goods end up marked down in January anyway.

Of course, this is a nuanced take. In our Benchmark research, we observed most sitewide sales do reserve room for exclusions, whether it’s best selling items you know will move at any price, your freshest arrivals, or products you simply can’t break MAP for. If you’re planning to keep specific products off-deal, you’re not alone.

To see exactly what your peers carve out of their events, you can ask ShopVision to extract the details from public promotional copy.

Sample prompt:

Which of our competitors ran sitewide Black Friday offers that mentioned exclusions (products, product lines, new arrivals, etc)?

And with Catalog and Pricing Intelligence, you can track the exact product exclusions from any sale event.

9. Consider margin-sparing sale tactics

One way to smooth out your margin profile is to include products in your headline sale, but keep some variations full price. For example, best selling core colors stay full price or a lower discount value than seasonal or slower moving colors.

With ShopVision Catalog and Pricing Intelligence, you can identify exactly how competitors are employing this strategy. For any time period, you can identify which product families were partially on-sale, and match back pricing to live events (versus permanent markdown activity).

Sample prompt:

Which of our DTC competitors are currently running color-selective sales, where specific colorways of a product are marked down while at least one variant of the same product stays at full price? Tell us which are likely to be permanent markdowns vs part of an active sale event.

10. Target the days outside of BFCM

In practice, many brands concentrate their savings events to on-or-around Black Friday weekend. And that’s a brand and business choice.

But only 17% of holiday ecommerce sales happen within the BFCM weekend. That leaves more than 80% of selling to the ‘halo’ days around it.

Of course, putting everything on discount throughout peak season has its tradeoffs, and market behavior across your peers may support holding the line. For example, in our performance running benchmark, most independent brands stopped discounting after Cyber Monday, while mainstream brands kept their Cyber sales running for weeks.

Casual footwear, on the other hand, showed sustained promotional activity post-CM, with roughly half the peer set leaning into extended discounts through December.

With ShopVision, you can reverse engineer promotional calendars brand-by-brand.

And you can slice the data by promotional mechanics: for example, which competitors ran true sitewide sales throughout December, versus merely pushing seasonal markdowns in marketing channels.

Sample prompt:

Which competitors ran holiday sale events between Cyber Monday and Christmas? List each distinct event with start date, end date, and headline offer.

11. Charge more for express shipping

If you offer standard and express, you can likely get away with charging a couple bucks more for express leading up to the standard shipping deadline. After the shipping cutoff, express shipping becomes a conversion lever. If you don’t offer free express shipping (or a reasonable cost), you risk losing sales to competitors and Amazon.

ShopVision can tell you exactly who in your market offered free express shipping as a value-added perk at any point during the holiday (and who offered it exclusively to members).

Sample prompt:

Which of our competitors offered free express shipping at any point during holiday 2025, and who reserved it for late-season (after or near standard shipping deadline)?

12. Have a ‘Q5’ ad strategy

This tip is from the Operators’ 2024 BFCM episode, but it’s still a goodie: take advantage of the uber-low CPMs post-shipping cutoff. Meta calls this ‘Q5’ and the strategy is: starting around December 25, switch focus to ‘treat yourself’ messaging. Use your matchback credits on these ads and run them right through to Valentine’s Day.

If you’re curious which of your peers are running this playbook (or just want some creative inspo), you can ask ShopVision to scope competitor Meta ads launched between December 19 and 31 that ran until mid-February using self-gifting themes.

Sample prompt:

Filter our competitors' Meta ads to what started running on or around Christmas and continued through to mid-Feb that are themed around self-gifting, treat yourself, new year new you, etc.

Run these prompts on your own market

Every sample prompt in this post works in ShopVision today, on your actual competitor set. Book a demo and we’ll load your peers and walk through their Holiday 2025 playbook with you before your next planning meeting. Or start with our free, industry-scoped Black Friday Benchmark reports.

This article is not affiliated with, sponsored by, or produced in partnership with The Operators podcast. Podcast clips are included for commentary and analysis; all views and interpretations outside those clips are ShopVision’s own.