Black Friday and Cyber Monday can be some of the most exciting days of the year for a retailer.
If you operate multiple stores and also sell through ecommerce, marketplaces, or both, my biggest piece of advice is to think about BFCM as more than a marketing event. It is also one of the biggest operations events of the year.
Just look at the scale of last year’s event:
- U.S. consumers spent $44.2 billion online during the five days from Thanksgiving through Cyber Monday in 2025, up 7.7% from the previous year, according to Adobe’s final 2025 holiday shopping report.
- Black Friday generated $11.8 billion in U.S. online sales, up 9.1%, while Cyber Monday reached a record $14.25 billion, according to Adobe Analytics.
- A record 202.9 million Americans shopped during the five-day Thanksgiving weekend, including 129.5 million in-store shoppers and 134.9 million online shoppers, according to the National Retail Federation and Prosper Insights & Analytics.
- Mobile has become a major part of the BFCM experience. 57.5% of Cyber Monday online sales came through mobile devices in 2025, representing $8.2 billion in spending, according to Adobe.
Those are huge numbers, but the lesson for a growing multi-location retailer is not that you need to compete with the largest retailers in the country. The lesson is that an enormous amount of customer demand gets compressed into a very short period of time.
The promotions and advertising generate the demand. What happens next depends on your inventory, systems, stores, warehouses, fulfillment processes, and people.
The good news is that you do not need to reinvent your entire operation before Black Friday. A relatively small number of operational improvements can make a meaningful difference when order volume increases.
If I were preparing a multi-location retail business for BFCM, these are the 10 areas I would focus on.
1. Make sure you know what inventory you actually have
I would start here because almost everything else depends on it. Your promotions, ecommerce availability, marketplace listings, BOPIS promises, and fulfillment decisions are only as good as the inventory information behind them.
You probably do not need to count every SKU in every store. Focus on the inventory most likely to matter during BFCM. That includes promotional products, best sellers, popular sizes and colors, high value items, products sold across several channels, and products that frequently have inventory discrepancies. If your systems say you have 12 units but the store can only find nine, now is the time to discover that.
Action Item: Identify your top BFCM SKUs and perform targeted cycle counts across the stores and warehouses holding them. Investigate meaningful discrepancies and get your inventory as accurate as reasonably possible before demand accelerates.
2. Be thoughtful about how much inventory you expose to each channel
Having five units in a store does not necessarily mean you should make all five available simultaneously to your website and every marketplace. One might be damaged, misplaced, reserved, or already in a customer’s hands.
This becomes increasingly important because online demand can arrive very quickly. During Cyber Week 2025, mobile devices drove 70% of online orders in the U.S., according to Salesforce’s analysis of more than 1.5 billion shoppers. When customers can discover and purchase products from virtually anywhere, small inventory synchronization delays can suddenly become real overselling problems. Safety stock and channel buffers can give your operation some breathing room.
Action Item: Review the inventory rules for your most important channels and products. Decide where you need safety stock, when low inventory should stop being published online, and what should happen when a product approaches its final few units.
3. Put inventory where you expect demand to happen
Having enough inventory across the company is different from having inventory in the right place.
Look at where your sales are likely to originate and where you can most efficiently fulfill those orders. A product might be sitting in large quantities at three slower stores while your warehouse and strongest ship from store locations are running low. Before BFCM, you still have an opportunity to reposition that inventory instead of discovering the imbalance after products start selling out.
I would look at historical sales, recent product velocity, regional demand, current stock levels, ecommerce demand, and the fulfillment capabilities of each location. You do not need a perfect forecast. You are trying to make better inventory decisions with the information you already have.
Action Item: Review your highest priority BFCM products by location. Transfer inventory where it makes sense, strengthen your best fulfillment locations, and identify excess stock that could benefit from additional promotion.
4. Know what you are promoting and why
I would resist the temptation to automatically discount everything. Different products can play different roles during BFCM. Some are great traffic drivers. Others protect margin. Accessories and complementary products can increase basket size. Older inventory might be a great candidate for aggressive promotion. Some products are already selling so well that there is little reason to offer a large discount.
Discount competition can be significant. During the 2025 holiday season, online discounts peaked at 30.9% for electronics, 29.6% for toys, 25.1% for apparel, and 20.3% for sporting goods, according to Adobe’s 2025 holiday shopping analysis. That does not mean your business needs to match those discounts. In fact, I think it is a good reason to understand your margins before entering the competition.
Action Item: Divide your important products into a few simple groups such as traffic drivers, margin protectors, basket builders, excess inventory, and protected inventory. Calculate the economics of the promotion before approving it, and make sure every significant discount has a reason behind it.
5. Keep marketing and operations closely connected
Marketing can create demand very quickly during BFCM. That is great when the rest of the business is prepared for it.
I would make sure the people running email, SMS, advertising, social campaigns, and marketplace promotions know what is happening operationally. If a promoted product is approaching a stockout, marketing should know. If you have excess inventory that needs demand, marketing should know that too. If a fulfillment location is struggling, you may want to avoid generating another surge of orders that will be routed there.
This creates an opportunity to actively manage BFCM instead of simply launching campaigns and hoping everything works. Your marketing team can help operations by steering demand toward the products and channels where you are best prepared to serve customers.
Action Item: Establish a simple communication process between marketing and operations. Agree in advance on who can pause a promotion, substitute a featured product, shift advertising, or reduce demand when inventory or fulfillment capacity becomes constrained.
6. Test real orders through every important sales channel
One of the most useful BFCM preparation exercises is also one of the simplest: place orders. Do not stop at confirming that an integration says “connected.” Place a real test order through your ecommerce site and each important marketplace. Follow the order all the way through your operation.
The volume concentrated into peak periods can be remarkable. During the peak hours of Cyber Monday 2025, between 8 p.m. and 10 p.m., U.S. consumers spent $16 million online every minute, according to Adobe Analytics. Your individual business obviously operates on a very different scale, but the lesson is the same. When demand accelerates, you want your systems and workflows to have already passed their tests.
I would also test the less convenient scenarios. Cancel an order. Process a return. Try an item with low inventory. Test BOPIS. Test ship from store. Confirm that tracking reaches the sales channel and customer. These are exactly the workflows that become much harder to troubleshoot when hundreds of real orders are waiting behind them.
Action Item: Complete at least one end-to-end test order for every major sales channel and fulfillment method before BFCM. Test the normal order lifecycle as well as cancellations and returns. Document anything that behaves unexpectedly and fix the highest risk issues first.
7. Decide which stores should participate in fulfillment
One of the great advantages of being a multi-location retailer is that your stores can potentially become part of your fulfillment network.
That does not mean every store should fulfill online orders. Some stores will have better inventory accuracy, more experienced managers, more packing space, better carrier access, or more available labor. Other stores may already be expecting extremely heavy foot traffic. Treating all locations identically can create unnecessary problems.
I would determine which stores are best equipped for ship from store and BOPIS, then give each location realistic capacity limits. A store capable of reliably shipping 30 orders per day should not suddenly receive 150 just because the inventory happens to be there. The goal is to use your store network as an advantage without overwhelming the people running it.
Action Item: Identify your strongest fulfillment stores, define what each location can realistically handle, confirm the picking and packing process, and establish a clear procedure for reducing or stopping new orders when a location reaches capacity.
8. Protect yourself against overselling across ecommerce and marketplaces
Multichannel inventory becomes especially important during BFCM because several channels may be competing for the same physical product at almost the same time.
The customer journey is becoming increasingly distributed as well. During Cyber Week 2025, social media generated 16% of U.S. digital traffic to retailers, while TikTok accounted for 9% of global social traffic and grew its share 55% year-over-year, according to Salesforce’s Cyber Week analysis. Customers can discover a product on one platform, purchase through another channel, or walk into one of your stores. Your inventory needs to keep up with that reality.
Make sure you understand which system represents your inventory source of truth and how inventory changes flow between your POS, ecommerce platform, marketplaces, stores, and warehouses. Pay particular attention to what happens when you sell the final units of a popular product. Also test how cancellations and returns affect availability because inventory can become inaccurate in both directions.
Action Item: Review the complete inventory synchronization process across your major channels. Confirm where inventory originates, how quickly changes propagate, what happens to the last few units, and whether marketplace inventory and fulfillment settings are ready for peak demand.
9. Know your fulfillment capacity and prepare for more volume
Before BFCM, I would want to know approximately how many orders each warehouse and participating store can actually process in a day.
It does not need to be a sophisticated calculation. Estimate how many orders the team can process per hour, how many productive hours you have, and how many people will be available. Then think about what happens if volume is two or three times normal. The bottleneck may not be picking. It might be packing stations, shipping labels, boxes, carrier pickups, or simply finding inventory quickly enough.
This is also the time to prepare all of the boring things that become surprisingly important during peak volume. Make sure you have enough boxes, mailers, labels, tape, printer supplies, pickup bags, scanners, and packing materials. Confirm carrier pickup schedules and understand what backup options are available if something does not go according to plan.
Action Item: Estimate daily fulfillment capacity for each warehouse and participating store. Identify the most likely bottleneck, add labor or equipment where it makes sense, stock necessary shipping supplies, and confirm carrier capacity before order volume increases.
10. Prepare your people for exceptions and customer problems
Even with excellent preparation, something will go wrong during BFCM. That is normal. What matters is how quickly your team identifies the problem and responds to it.
The customer experience after the purchase deserves particular attention. Retailers expected 17% of 2025 holiday sales to be returned, and 71% of consumers said they were less likely to shop with a retailer again after a poor returns experience, according to research from the National Retail Federation and Happy Returns. That is a good reminder that a successful BFCM order does not necessarily end when the package is delivered.
Think through the exceptions most likely to occur. A store cannot find an item. A marketplace order does not import correctly. Inventory stops updating. A location develops a fulfillment backlog. A carrier misses a pickup. A customer needs to return an online purchase at a store. The best time to decide who owns these situations is before they happen.
Action Item: Write down your most likely BFCM exceptions and assign an owner to each one. Give your teams a clear escalation path and make sure operations, stores, ecommerce, fulfillment, and customer service know how to communicate when something needs immediate attention.
One Final Thought
I hope this is an extremely successful Black Friday and Cyber Monday season for every retailer reading this.
The opportunity is certainly there. U.S. consumers spent a record $44.2 billion online during Cyber Week 2025, while a record 202.9 million people shopped either in stores or online during the five-day Thanksgiving weekend, according to Adobe and the National Retail Federation.
A great BFCM, however, is not just about how many orders you generate. It is about turning that demand into fulfilled orders, happy customers, healthy margins, and momentum that carries through the rest of the holiday season.
The retailers in the strongest position are the ones that can see what is happening across their business and react quickly. As you add stores, ecommerce, marketplaces, warehouses, BOPIS, ship from store, and other fulfillment options, keeping all of those moving pieces coordinated becomes increasingly important.
That is also a big part of why we are building Sqquid.
Sqquid is designed to provide the retail operations layer connecting POS, ecommerce, marketplaces, inventory, orders, and fulfillment. The goal is to help growing retailers operate all of those channels as one coordinated retail business instead of a collection of disconnected systems.
Whether you use Sqquid or not, the principle I would take into this BFCM season is simple:
Know what you have. Know what you can sell. Know what you can fulfill. Keep your teams connected. And make it as easy as possible for your customers to have a great experience.
Here is to a busy, profitable, and very successful BFCM season. 🥂