Black Friday Cyber Monday is a great opportunity for eCommerce brands to drive more sales to close out the year. 

With Black Friday weekend sales in the UK forecast to increase significantly by about half a billion compared to the previous year, and online retail representing 17.3% of all UK retail sales in 2024, the opportunity for UK eCommerce brands has never been bigger.

But here's the reality: whilst some brands are celebrating record sales, others are dealing with inventory disasters, websites not loading as intended, and customer service nightmares that damage brand reputation. 

The difference? Preparation that goes beyond just setting up a few discount codes or making sure seasonal branding is live. 

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Why BFCM 2025 Will Be Different for UK Retailers

The eCommerce landscape has evolved dramatically. With mobile shopping driving 38% of online sales during Cyber Week and UK consumers increasingly expecting seamless omnichannel experiences, the fight for consumer attention and being able to convert them at a lower CAC (customer acquisition cost) has never been more fierce. 

Black Friday 2024 trends revealed clear changes in UK shopping behaviour, with online pharmacy and health products growing by 18% year-on-year, whilst fashion, sports, and outdoor goods remained consistent favourites throughout the holiday season.

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Today's UK shoppers expect lightning-fast websites, personalised experiences, and seamless checkout processes. They're comparing your site performance against Amazon's, your customer service against John Lewis', and your post-purchase experience against brands that have perfected retention marketing.

The brands that understand this - and prepare accordingly - are the ones capturing the lion's share of that growing UK market opportunity.

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AI & Live eCommerce: The consumer shopping shift

Tools like ChatGPT have become a sidekick for many people in their daily lives. With ChatGPT now having between 800 million and 1 billion weekly active users, it’s hard to ignore the opportunities that brands could leverage to increase their sales and brand visibility, the same goes for live shopping. 

The technical elements of your website play a crucial role in allowing LLMs (large language models - like ChatGPT) to access information on your website to serve people searching. 

More depth, value and personal experiences are needed on websites to be able to rank for these unique sets of searches being made through AI tools. 

We have a great example of how consumers are likely to shop with ChatGPT throughout the 2025 Black Friday Cyber Monday season. 

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Let’s get into how we help Shopify brands prepare for success during BFCM.

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Technical Infrastructure - Your Foundation for eCommerce Success this Black Friday

Whilst focussing on page load speed is really important at this time of year, maintaining performance and a faultless user experience is crucial when trying to cut through the sales noise that consumers will be experiencing. 

Your customers are shopping around, trying to find the best deals and presents for their families and friends. Your website may be fast, but there could be other technical or user experience elements from holding people back from converting.

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Why is my cart abandonment rate so high?

A study by Baymard Institute, a web usability research organisation, shows that an estimated 70% of users fail to complete their purchases. 

Every business and eCommerce store is unique. There’s no one size fits all approach when identifying cart abandonment issues. 

As a Shopify design and development agency that has built over 300 eCommerce sites - big and small - our discovery audits have uncovered some of the common issues why users abandon their carts. 

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Common reasons why shoppers abandon carts 

• Delivery is too expensive
• Having to create an account
• Preferred payment method wasn’t an option
• Autofill not being enabled 
• Pricing was unclear
• Unable to see the returns policy
• Navigation was too complicated

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These are some of the more common reasons we see customers abandoning carts. But sometimes, you have to dig a little bit deeper into the data. 

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What to check on Shopify before BFCM25

Have tracking & analytics in place before the busy season. When you have tracking in place, you can see how people are interacting with your website, where they’re coming from and then you can make decisions on how to improve their journey. 

Without the data, it is just guesswork on your best opinion.

Two free, must have tracking and analytics tools that eCommerce brands should have in place are

• Microsoft Clarity - Brilliant for heatmapping and usability insights.
• Google Analytics - Good for understanding user behaviour & marketing attribution. 

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Check Shopify discount codes are working well in advance. You don’t want to launch your BFCM sale, send out emails only to realise that customers are trying to check out and their discounts aren’t working. 

Gift and product personalisation is a huge conversion factor for people shopping throughout BFCM. Think of it from a consumer point of view, if you offer personalisation on gifts but it’s hard to configure, it’s likely they’ll head to your competitors. 

Take the journey yourself or ask your team to head to your website, find a gift they want to personalise and see how easy the process was. 

Having cart drawers enabled on your Shopify store makes the user shopping experience much less frustrating. If you don’t have a simple cart drawer, it can become irritating for users to just check what they’ve got in their cart already - Plus, you’re also missing a big opportunity to increase AOV (Average Order Value) by not displaying cart drawer upsells. 

For brands on Shopify Plus, make sure you have upsells directly at checkout level with cross-sells and up-sells. 

Having Post Purchase offers when customers have completed checkout around BFCM can also help bump up your AOV, you never know what your shoppers may have forgotten. 

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eCommerce Website Performance Audit

We’ll keep this simple because it’s easy to start complicating and going down the rabbit hole. Your performance audit should just be a review of your website and whether it’s in its most optimal condition for users to shop. 

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1. Run a Google PageSpeed insight report. 

Super simple. Head over to Google PageSpeed Insights tool, this will give you a good insight to the overall performance, accessibility, best practices and SEO elements. 

It won’t run the fixes for you, but it will show you what areas need improvement. When you scroll further down on the report, it will give you insights and diagnostics. Sharing this with your team will help you get the necessary fixes in place to improve the loading speed and overall usability of your Shopify store. 

TIP: One key area that a lot of people miss is Cumulative Layout Shift. This is where a user is on a page on your website and elements are still loading in, forcing the page to jump. Be sure to address this as it can make it difficult for potential customers to shop and will impact your SEO. 

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2. UX Testing & Heatmapping

What we aim to do with user experience testing is to establish if there are any broken elements or potential blockers on a user journey that could stop visitors from converting. 

You can check for broken links on your website in Google Search Console by heading to Indexing > Pages > Not found (404). 

From here you can rebuild any broken links and point users in the right direction. 

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Heatmapping can be done through Microsoft Clarity for free, but there are also other more advanced heatmapping tools like CrazyEgg and Hotjar. We recommend keeping it simple and using what works best for your business. 

For bigger brands, it’ll pay to have a more complex tech stack in place, for smaller brands, don’t get caught up in deciding what tools will be best. 

Another element to focus on at this stage is your cart abandonment rate. Are there a lot of people ditching a cart full? Are they converting after receiving your cart abandonment flow?

Anything that can make the user journey easier or further convince them to follow through with that purchase can potentially help you increase conversion rate. 

3. Optimising Checkouts, In-cart Upsells + Free Shipping Thresholds 

Optimising a checkout sounds like a big complex process, in reality it isn’t. 

Thankfully Shopify has done a lot of the hard work and offers the world’s highest converting eCommerce checkout checkout. Shopify’s one-page checkout allows customers to enter and review their order, shipping and payment details on one page. 

If your eCommerce website is built on a different platform like Magento or WordPress, you may find it harder or there may be more setup required to achieve a streamlined one-page checkout. 

Once you progress through to the checkout, they have checkout upsells enabled where you can start to add more value to the shopper by suggesting items that match or other gift options. 

If you’re still struggling to get your checkout just the way you need it, we have a useful blog on mastering Shopify Checkout customisations. 

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Payment Processing and Checkout Optimisation

Having as many payment options available to visitors is the best way to go. Everyone has their preference, some like to buy-now-pay-later and others prefer to just run everything through PayPal. 

Especially through busy seasonal periods like BFCM, we recommend having buy-now-pay-later services like Klarna and Clearpay and Shop Pay integrations set up. 

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Optimising your Shopify store feels overwhelming. Following these steps will help get your website up to speed and converting this Black Friday. 

If you’re struggling to optimise your Shopify store – and feel you could benefit from some support – we’d love to hear from you! Get in touch to see how our store support can help scale your business, removing stress from your team.

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