Black Friday and Cyber Monday are the two days a year when everything happens at once. Traffic spikes, order volume spikes, and so does the number of customers who type the wrong address, grab the wrong size in the rush, or panic-cancel the second the confirmation email lands. The brands that come out ahead aren't the ones who just discount harder. They're the ones who make sure every order captures as much revenue as it can, and that the flood of "can I change this" requests doesn't land on their support team's desk.
Two things separate a good Black Friday from a brutal one: how much you get out of every order through upselling, and how much of that order volume never turns into a support ticket, thanks to self-service editing. Here's how to get both right before the weekend hits.
1. Upselling: get more out of every order
Every touchpoint is a chance to upsell
There are four distinct touchpoints across the buying journey where you can put Black Friday deals in front of customers: Checkout, the One-Click Upsell step right after, the Thank You Page, and the Order Status Page once the order's placed. Each one is a separate opportunity to showcase the sale and lift AOV, from the moment a customer is about to buy through to well after they've paid.
Order Editing puts an upsell opportunity at each of those four touchpoints: Checkout, One-Click Upsell, Thank You Page and Order Status Page. Instead of one shot at increasing AOV, you get four, spread across the entire journey from the moment a customer decides to buy to well after they've paid.
Black Friday upsell strategies you need to be running
Free shipping threshold. Show customers exactly how close they are to unlocking free shipping, and suggest a product that gets them there. Because Order Editing works across Checkout, One-Click Upsell, Thank You Page and Order Status Page, a customer who misses the threshold at checkout still gets the nudge afterwards, instead of the opportunity disappearing the moment they pay.
GWP upsells. Set a gift to unlock once an order crosses a chosen value, and Order Editing tracks that threshold post-purchase. So if a customer adds another item on the Thank You Page or Order Status Page and pushes their order over the line, they get the gift automatically.
Put more eyes on your sale items. Upsell an existing sale item, rather than only full-price stock, so the offer feels like an extension of the deal they just bought into rather than a step backwards. Upsell a product that pairs with what's already in the order, so the suggestion feels relevant rather than like a random bestseller.
Thank You for Purchasing Offer. Offer a product at a steeper discount than your sitewide rate, positioned as a thank-you for purchasing, so it reads as something exclusive rather than an offer they could have added at checkout anyway.
Order Editing Features to take your upselling to the next level
Schedule strategies to go live and come down automatically. You can now set a strategy to switch on and switch off on a schedule, so your Black Friday offer activates the moment the sale starts and disappears the moment it ends, without anyone needing to be online at midnight to flip a toggle. Set it once earlier in the week and walk away.
Content blocks with supporting imagery. Upsells can now include content blocks that use imagery to draw attention to the offer itself, not just the product. During a weekend when every brand in a customer's inbox is shouting about a sale, a visual block that clearly signals "here's the deal" earns more attention than plain text in a list.
Split the Checkout Box and the Checkout Upsell. Use the Checkout Box for shipping protection upsells, and keep your Checkout Upsell focused purely on product upsell items. Bundling protection offers into the same slot as your product upsell dilutes both. Separating them means shipping protection gets asked once, cleanly, and your Checkout Upsell space is dedicated entirely to driving additional order value.
2. Self-service editing: keep the tickets away from your team
Prepare for the influx before it happens, not after
Order volume on Black Friday doesn't just mean more sales. It means more of every request your support team already deals with on a normal day, compressed into 72 hours: wrong addresses, wrong sizes, forgotten discount codes, and a wave of "actually, cancel that" messages from customers who bought on impulse and are already having second thoughts.
Self-service order editing exists for exactly this. Instead of every one of those requests becoming a ticket, customers fix addresses, swap sizes, upgrade shipping, apply a forgotten code, or cancel outright themselves, on the order confirmation and Order Status Pages, inside whatever edit window you've set.
Order Editing Features you need to turn on for BFCM
Flash Sale mode handles the volume itself. Flash Sale is built to process thousands of orders every minute without falling over, so editing and upsells both keep working at 6pm on Black Friday exactly as well as they do at 6am on a Tuesday. That means your team spends the weekend on the handful of tickets that genuinely need a person, not fielding address changes that should never have reached them in the first place.
Save the Sale catches the panic cancels before they happen. Impulse buying is part of what makes Black Friday Black Friday, and impulse buying comes with buyer's remorse attached. When a customer starts to cancel, Save the Sale asks why first. If the reason is fixable, wrong size, wrong colour, changed their mind about one item, they're shown the fix directly instead of a plain cancel button. A customer who meant "I need a different size" gets a Replace option in the same flow, rather than cancelling the whole order and either not coming back or placing a fresh order your team has to sort out separately.
If the customer still wants to cancel after that, it goes through immediately. No one gets stuck. But a meaningful share of Black Friday cancellations aren't really cancellations, they're customers who couldn't see a faster way to fix the order, and Save the Sale gives them one before they give up on it.
Why this matters more on Black Friday than any other week
Brands using Order Editing year-round already see what self-service does to a support queue: Oh Polly cut order-change tickets by 98%, Scandiborn cut support tickets in half while adding a new revenue line, and Ridge redirected 80% of order-related tickets away from their team while unlocking over $1M in incremental revenue. Every one of those numbers matters more, not less, during the highest-volume week of the year, when the gap between a team drowning in address changes and a team handling only what actually needs them is the difference between a good Black Friday and a brutal one.
Read the Oh Polly case study →
Read the Scandiborn case study →
A simple pre-Black Friday checklist
- Confirm your upsell strategy is live across Checkout, One-Click Upsell, Thank You Page and Order Status Page.
- Schedule your Black Friday strategy to switch on and off automatically, so it doesn't rely on someone being online.
- Add a content block with imagery to your top offer so it stands out.
- Split shipping protection into the Checkout Box and keep your Checkout Upsell focused on product upsells.
- Make sure Save the Sale is switched on before the weekend starts, not after the first wave of cancellations shows up.
