Black Friday lands on November 27 this year, with Cyber Monday following on November 30. Most ecommerce owners have spent weeks on offers, email schedules, and ad budgets. Far fewer have spent an hour buying something from their own store on a phone.
That hour matters more than it used to. Adobe Analytics reported that US shoppers spent $44.2 billion online during Cyber Week 2025, and 57.5% of Cyber Monday sales happened on a mobile device. On Thanksgiving Day, mobile passed 60% of online sales for the first time.
Your Black Friday customer is not sitting at a desk. They're on a phone, probably distracted, and one tap away from a competitor selling something similar.
Where the sale actually gets lost
Baymard Institute, which has studied checkout behavior for years, puts the average documented cart abandonment rate at around 70%. Some of that is people browsing with no plan to buy. A lot of it isn't.
When Baymard surveyed US shoppers about why they abandoned a checkout, the top reasons looked like this (shoppers could pick more than one, so the figures overlap):
- Extra costs were too high (shipping, tax, fees): 47%
- The site wanted them to create an account: 25%
- Delivery was too slow: 24%
- They didn't trust the site with their card details: 19%
- The checkout was too long or complicated: 18%
- They couldn't see the total cost up front: 17%
- The site had errors or crashed: 14%
- There weren't enough payment methods: 11%
Almost none of these are traffic problems. They are website problems, and most of them can be fixed in a weekend.
Day 1: Fix what's costing you orders at checkout
Buy something from your own store, on your phone
Use mobile data, not your office wifi. Pick a product, add it to the cart, and check out the way a stranger would. Time it, and count the taps. Then hand your phone to someone who has never used your site and watch them do the same. Anything that makes either of you hesitate is costing you sales.
Show the full cost early
Surprise costs are the most common reason people abandon checkout. Put a shipping estimate in the cart, announce your free-shipping threshold in a banner, and make sure the total at step one is close to the total at the last step.
Turn on guest checkout
A quarter of shoppers who abandon cite being forced to create an account. Let people buy as a guest, then invite them to save their details after the order is placed.
Cut the form
Baymard's checkout benchmark found the average US checkout showing shoppers around 23 form elements, while its testing suggests 12 to 14 is achievable. Remove optional fields like company name, make phone number optional unless your carrier needs it, and switch on address autocomplete.
Add express payment
Apple Pay, Google Pay, and PayPal let a mobile shopper pay without typing a card number into a small screen. If you're on Shopify, switch on Shop Pay too. On a phone, every field you remove is a reason fewer people leave.
Day 2: Protect the site from the traffic you're paying for
Speed up your mobile pages
A study commissioned by Google and carried out by Deloitte looked at 37 brands and more than 30 million sessions. It found that improving mobile load times by just 0.1 seconds lifted retail conversion rates by 8.4% and average order value by 9.2%. The data is from 2019, but it remains the most widely cited research on speed and revenue.
Quick wins: compress hero banners and product images, remove apps and plugins you no longer use, and cut auto-playing sliders and stacked popups from your sale banner. Run your homepage, a product page, and your cart through Google PageSpeed Insights and fix whatever is flagged in red.
Test every discount code, start to finish
Apply each code on mobile and desktop, with one item, with several items, and with a free-shipping threshold in play. A discount code that fails at 9am on Black Friday costs more than any typo you'll ever publish.
Prepare for the spike
Ask your hosting provider what traffic level your plan can handle, and switch on caching and a CDN if you haven't. Set up uptime alerts that go to your phone. Then freeze changes from November 24: no new plugins, no theme edits, no "quick fixes" the night before.
Put trust where doubt happens
Nearly one in five abandoning shoppers didn't trust the site with their card details, and Black Friday brings a lot of first-time visitors who found you through an ad. Make your returns policy visible from the product page and cart, place reviews next to the buy button, show clear contact details, and display secure payment badges at checkout.
What to watch during the sale
From November 26 to December 1, check three numbers a few times a day: mobile conversion rate, drop-off at each checkout step, and site errors. If mobile converts far worse than desktop, that gap tells you where to look first.
Fix small problems as they appear. Hold anything bigger until the sale is over.
A Black Friday campaign rarely fails because the discount was wrong. It fails because a shopper hit a slow page, a surprise fee, or a form that wouldn't autofill, with a competitor one tap away. You have a little under three weeks. That's enough.
