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Black Friday falls on November 27th this year. That sounds like a long way off, but like any promotional period, it will be here sooner than you think.
Black Friday and Cyber Monday is a heavily-advertised, extended weekend of additional traffic and purchase intent, falling right around the time when most of the world is doing their Christmas shopping in earnest. This presents a huge opportunity to not only to boost sales in the short term with limited-time offers, but also to introduce your brand to a whole new segment of idle shoppers who may become loyal long-term customers.
Data from Adobe found that £1.16 billion was spent online in the UK on Black Friday 2025, while Cyber Weekend the same year generated £3.8 billion in total online sales.
More broadly, the UK holiday ecommerce market continued to grow, reaching £26.9 billion between 1 November and 31 December, a year-on-year growth of 4.1%.
For Vendors, there’s a clear takeaway here: Black Friday isn’t a single promotional holiday, and it hasn’t been for a while. Your brand needs to have its inventory, retail pricing, promotions, content, and advertising fully prepared before the event, all while retaining sufficient budget and stock to capitalise on Cyber Weekend and the extended Christmas shopping period.
To make the most of the biggest shopping day of the year, you’ll need to ensure your brand is fully prepared in the way of inventory, pricing, content and advertising.
In this guide, we’ll give you a top-level Black Friday prep checklist you can start using now, explore the Black Friday levers you can pull as a Vendor, and the best practices you can use in different Amazon marketing channels to ensure your Black Friday is as successful as possible.
A large part of the advice given out for Amazon Black Friday marketing assumes a Seller Central model.
However, when you’re operating as a Vendor, your commercial relationship will change almost every playbook for a seller brand on Amazon, including pricing, Black Friday promotions, inventory, and the kind of advertising you can leverage.
Here are some of the biggest differences you’ll face as a Vendor going into this year’s Black Friday, and the direct impact this will have on your event.
Retail Price Ownership: As a Vendor, you can’t guarantee the exact consumer price Amazon will display during Black Friday. Because of this, you’ll need to build wholesale margins that allow room for a sizable discount, while still protecting your profitability.
Inventory and Fulfilment Responsibilities: Operating on Vendor Central, you’ll need to forecast and fulfil your purchase orders according to the platform’s timelines, and avoid late POs or understocking that could create Vendor Central chargebacks.
Promotions and Deals: Deals submitted through Vendor Central often require more lead time for Amazon approval. You’ll need to treat promotion validation windows as hard deadlines, and select hero SKUs for strong promotions, rather than diluting their impact across too many ASINs.
Advertising Access: As a Vendor, you’ll be able to leverage Amazon’s buying relationship, combining merchandising and DSP for effective upper-funnel reach, then feeding into Amazon for a conversion. Just make sure that any ad creatives referencing a specific discount match Amazon’s retail price.
Here’s a top-level planning checklist you can use to get ahead of your Amazon Black Friday marketing strategy, in order of priority.
Amazon advertising will be your primary engine for broadcasting your deals and keeping your ASINs competitive. However, it’s also likely to increase costs. This is an area where mistakes will be particularly expensive.
According to data from Pacvue, CPC goes through a spike around Black Friday, and has been increasing with each year as brands compete more and more for visibility.
Many brands we work with question whether they should advertise during Black Friday at all, as they’re already eroding margins at least slightly when their deals are running. But it’s important to remember that Black Friday discounts and advertising serve different objectives. Discounts drive conversion, and advertising drives visibility.
Events like these concentrate huge volumes of shoppers into a short period, all while your competitors are increasing their advertising. If you participate with discounts, but switch off your ads, you risk funding the promotion anyway while letting the competition capture demand.
To give your ads the best fighting chance, here’s an effective framework you can use to map out your own strategy:
Phase 1 - Awareness: Run broad sponsored brand and DSP campaigns to start generating visibility for the product groups you’re planning to discount. Brand-level Sponsored Brand assets and DSP lifestyle creatives can be particularly effective for capturing top-of-funnel traffic.
Phase 2 - Demand Capture: Channel more budget towards Sponsored Products and Sponsored Display remarketing. Use historical data and more short-range monitoring to increase your bids on high-converting keywords and ASINs.
Phase 3 - The Big Day: For Black Friday and Cyber Monday, raise your daily budgets, tighten up any negative keyword lists, and utilise dynamic creatives if possible.
Remember that as a Vendor, you’ll often have stronger access to merchandising placements where you can combine deals with DSP reach. If your inventory is ready, this can create a highly efficient upper-funnel sale flow.
We should also reiterate that Amazon’s control of the retail price will affect your ad creative, and it’s crucial to avoid advertising a promotional price you can’t control. Work closely with your Amazon account team to confirm the price that will go live before you schedule any price-sensitive creative.
Amazon’s Brand+ AI-powered advertising has expanded considerably over the past year, and is now generally available to UK accounts. You can leverage features like Audience Signals to feed your own first-party audiences into the AI optimisation process, while Brand Outcome Optimisation can help you optimise towards outcomes that go beyond simple reach.
Some Brand+ features are still in beta or have varying availability in the UK, so make sure to check eligibility before making them a firm part of your Black Friday strategy.
These new features have a clear benefit in terms of scale and reduced manual campaign management. The trade-off is that giving Amazon more control over your audience discovery and optimisation could make performance harder to compare directly with the tightly-controlled campaigns you’re used to.
Rather than going all-in on AI-powered advertising, Brand+ and its features should ideally be treated as a testable addition to your existing DSP and Sponsored Ads strategy, particularly for any hero SKUs where you have strong creative, and enough time and budget to learn useful lessons ahead of Black Friday.
Remember that an automated campaign can successfully generate demand, but it won’t compensate for weak promotional economics or insufficient stock. Inventory, retail pricing, and deal strategy all need to be well-aligned before you consider scaling automated traffic.
Need a new Amazon advertising plan? Our comprehensive advertising service allows you to leverage exclusive insights from Amazon’s data ecosystem and optimise your campaigns for the strongest possible ROAS.
Under Vendor Central’s wholesale model, you won’t have direct control over the retail display price the same way Amazon Sellers do. With this limitation, you’ll need to adopt more wholesaler-appropriate pricing tactics to keep your listed prices competitive during the promotional period.
Some tactics to think about include:
By applying these tactics in a way that makes sense to your account, you’ll be better-placed to maintain smooth inflow and order fulfillment throughout the busy Black Friday period, while maximising your visibility in the highest-value placements available for Vendors.
Need support with wholesale price modelling for Black Friday? Our full channel management service lets you tap into a wealth of Vendor pricing expertise and build a promotion / PO model tailored to your catalogue.
Success on Black Friday requires both visibility and conversion.
While sought-after promotions will bring traffic to your listings, the quality of your listings are what will actually secure a sale.
At Wake, we’ve been able to achieve up to 200% increases in shipped COGs through content optimisation alone, so don’t make the common mistake of thinking that content is a minor detail or something that can be treated as an afterthought.
Here are some of the most effective quick wins to prioritise when developing content across your catalogue:
Need more bandwidth to build great content for Black Friday? Our ContentStudio listing optimisation service will help you create compelling, competitive listings to maximise your conversion rate.
Perhaps the biggest change Vendors will plan for this year is the growing popularity of AI-assisted shopping, both in the form of Amazon’s integrated AI features like Alexa for Shopping (still called Rufus in some territories) and off-Amazon AI tools like ChatGPT.
Data from fintech platform Adyen shows that the use of AI assistants by UK shoppers has more than doubled year-on-year, rising from 12% in 2025 to 28% in 2026. The growing presence of AI in ecommerce could even present an opportunity for challenger brands to win more organic traffic that’s classically been dominated by their larger rivals.
Organic product discovery using AI tools works differently to standard Amazon search, using sophisticated semantic understanding to determine what a shopper actually wants, rather than simply matching searches to keywords that appear in product copy.
Though the standard search experience isn’t going to disappear this shopping season, you should still make a point to tweak your approach to content slightly. This means ensuring your product listings are able to answer the more direct, conversational questions your audience may be likely to ask an AI tool when searching for a product like yours, being explicit about:
When your content is built to resolve these kinds of queries, you’ll be better positioned for organic surfacing by a new and growing segment who start their product search using AI tools, and may even enjoy stronger overall visibility than competitors who are late to the party.
Black Friday promises a huge wave of traffic and interest for Amazon Vendors. However, it’s also a highly competitive period of the shopping calendar where you’ll need to develop key touchpoints to make the most of it.
By understanding the nuances of Black Friday on Vendor Central, getting a head start on your strategy, and executing well-timed strategies across logistics, advertising, and content, you can give yourself a strong starting point and maximise your chances for success throughout the event.
We’ll wrap up with some common questions about Black Friday we often hear from our clients.
For more support with getting your brand ready for Black Friday, be sure to check out our other blog posts, or get in touch for a free Vendor Central consultation.
No. Deep discounts across a large catalogue can destroy category margins and condition customers to wait. For better results, focus your resources on hero SKUs where increased volume and market share create long-term value.
Usually, but not always. Amazon often increases POs ahead of major events if it expects demand, but this all depends on your Vendor history, forecast accuracy, and how reliably you can get stock into Fulfillment Centres. Plan to submit your promotions early and align POs with carefully-forecast uplift.
There’s no universal number, but you should plan for higher CPCs and increased budgets. A good rule of thumb is to budget a staged uplift (e.g. +25-50% in the lead-up, and a further +25-50% on peak days), then flex to ROAS in real time. Historical data from holiday periods shows ad spend and CPC spikes.
The biggest operational pitfalls to look out for are stockouts, failed labelling / ASN compliance, late PO fulfilment, and chargebacks. If left unchecked, these issues can quickly erode margin and harm your Vendor relationship. To guard against these issues, have contingency stock and a chargeback dispute plan ready to go.
To deal with issues that come with large catalogues, use a prioritisation framework (revenue / margin / readiness), standardise templates for content, automate or outsource campaign set-up, and focus your time and resources on a small set of high-impact SKUs.