The markdown is a habit, not a plan.
Karen Wohlsen · 12 October 2026
Black Friday lands on 27 November this year. Most Australian Shopify stores already know what they’ll do: pick a number, put it across the site, and hope volume covers the gap.
The volume is real. The Australian Retailers Association forecast $6.8 billion in spending across last year’s Black Friday and Cyber Monday period, up 4 per cent. CommBank iQ data put online spending over the two-week Black Friday window at $8 billion, up 9.3 per cent on the year before.
So the shoppers turn up. The question is what you pay to serve them. A sitewide 25 per cent off is the most expensive way to sell to people who were already on your product page with their card out. This playbook is for stores that want the peak traffic without handing a quarter of the ticket price to every one of those buyers.
What a sitewide 25 per cent actually costs
Take one product. It sells for $200 and costs you $100 to land, so every full-price sale earns $100.
| Scenario | Price paid | Margin per sale | Sales to earn $1,000 |
|---|---|---|---|
| Full price | $200 | $100 | 10 |
| Sitewide 25% off | $150 | $50 | 20 |
| Private offer accepted at $180 | $180 | $80 | 13 |
A 25 per cent markdown on a 50 per cent margin halves your profit per unit. You need to sell twice as many just to stand still. Very few stores double their units over a long weekend, which is why so many finish peak with record revenue and a worse month.
The last row is the alternative. One shopper, one product, a price you agreed to in private. You keep $80 instead of $50, and nobody else saw the number.
Who you’re really discounting for
A sitewide sale gives the same price cut to every shopper who arrives. That includes the loyal customer who’d have paid full price on Tuesday. It includes the person who added to cart in October and was always going to buy. You’re paying all of them to do something they were already doing.
The shopper you actually need over peak is the almost-buyer. She’s on the product page, she’s read the reviews, she’s checked the shipping. The price is a little more than she wants to spend, so she leaves without a word. Most stores never find out she was there.
A markdown is a blunt way to reach her. It works, but you pay for it on every other order. And it teaches the whole list to wait for November, which is a problem you’ll still be paying for at EOFY.
The playbook: six moves before 27 November
None of this needs a site rebuild. It needs a shortlist, some numbers you already have, and a few hours before the traffic arrives.
- Pick 20 to 50 products, not the whole catalogue. Open Shopify analytics and find products with plenty of views and a weak conversion rate. Considered purchases are the best fit: furniture, jewellery, sneakers, homewares. Those are the pages where the almost-buyer stalls.
- Set a floor for each one. The floor is the lowest price you’d accept from one shopper, in private. Work it out from landed cost and the margin you need. On most products it will sit well above whatever your sitewide sale price would have been.
- Leave the ticket price alone. Your product page keeps showing full price. Shoppers who were happy to pay it still do. You aren’t announcing a sale to the market, your competitors or your full-price customers.
- Switch on private offers a week early. Turn Bidit on for your shortlist by Friday 20 November. You’ll see real offers on real products before the peak, and you can adjust floors while traffic is still normal.
- Give your list a reason to open the email. Instead of a code, send your email and SMS subscribers to the shortlisted products with offers switched on just for them. Bidit can show the offer option only to visitors who arrive from those links, so the rest of your site stays exactly as it is.
- Set rules for the weekend. Decide which offers get accepted on the spot and which get a counter. Shoppers get an answer in seconds, and nobody on your team has to watch the inbox at 11pm on Saturday.
If you still want a promotion, keep it narrow: one category, one bundle, a gift with purchase. The aim is to stop the sitewide number being your only lever.
What to measure on Tuesday 1 December
Revenue will tell you the weekend was busy. It won’t tell you whether it was worth it. Pull these numbers for the shortlisted products and compare them with last year’s peak:
- Gross margin per order, not revenue per order.
- Conversion rate on the shortlist, against the same products last November.
- Average accepted offer as a share of ticket price. If offers land at 90 per cent and last year’s markdown was 75 per cent, that gap is margin you kept.
- Full-price sales on the same products. These should hold steady, because full-price shoppers never saw a cut.
- Returning buyers over the next 90 days. At Bevilles, 45 per cent of shoppers who made an offer came back and bought again.
The offers also tell you where your prices really sit. Use them to set January floors and plan your next promotion with numbers instead of guesses.
Keep your ticket price this peak
Black Friday doesn’t have to be the weekend you train your customers to wait. Keep the price on the page. Give the almost-buyer a private way to make an offer at the purchase moment, and let her leave with the product instead of an open tab.
From the day this goes live, there are five and a half weeks left. That’s enough time to pick a shortlist, set floors and see real offers before 27 November.
Book a demo and we’ll set up your peak shortlist with you.