The BFCM headline number goes up every year. Whether your margin does is a completely separate question, and it is the one worth studying.
We have now watched three BFCM seasons from inside a discount app, and the most useful thing we can offer is not a prediction, it is a pattern. Shopify merchant sales ran $9.3 billion over BFCM 2023 and $11.5 billion over BFCM 2024. This year continued the same direction of travel. But the number that grows in the press release is not the number that shows up in a store's December bank balance, and the gap between those two has taught us more than the totals ever did.
The trend that matters is not the total
It is easy to read the rising headline as good news and stop there. More sales, bigger weekend, everyone wins. But the total is a measure of volume, not health. A store can post its best-ever revenue weekend and enter December with less profit than the year before, and plenty do. The interesting variable across three seasons was never how big the weekend got. It was how much of each store's revenue survived contact with its own discounts.
Watched that way, the three years tell a consistent story. The stores that struggled were not the ones that discounted too little or too much in aggregate. They were the ones that discounted flat, applying a single rate to every order regardless of who placed it or what it contained.
What got more expensive each year
Here is the pattern as we saw it develop.
| Season | Shopify merchant sales | What we saw at store level |
|---|---|---|
| BFCM 2023 | $9.3 billion | Flat sitewide still common; margin damage visible but tolerated as the cost of the weekend |
| BFCM 2024 | $11.5 billion | More stores carving out thin-margin products; the cost of a flat rate becoming harder to ignore |
| BFCM 2025 | Upward, figure not stated | Targeting more mainstream; stores that varied depth held margin visibly better than those that did not |
The direction is the point. Flat sitewide discounting did not fail suddenly. It got a little more expensive every year, as discovery got cheaper and more of a store's BFCM traffic arrived already intending to buy. The more high-intent buyers a weekend attracts, the more a flat discount pays to people who did not need it. Three seasons of that compounding is why targeting stopped being a sophistication and started being table stakes.
The three habits that held up
Across all three years, the stores that came out ahead shared the same handful of habits, and none of them was clever.
They planned combinations before the season. The margin damage we saw most often was never the intended discount. It was two offers meeting in a cart because nobody had decided whether they should. Stores that mapped their combinations in advance simply did not have that failure mode.
They targeted depth instead of applying a flat rate. Deeper volume tiers where a bigger cart justified it, segment pricing for the customers who were coming anyway, and shallower or no discount on thin-margin products. Same discount budget, spent where it changed a decision.
They set a floor. A profit floor meant the long tail of carts nobody models, the odd quantities and currency edges and stored codes, could not quietly cost them. Three years running, the stores with a floor slept better and lost less.
What we are watching into next year
Two things feel early but real. First, the same targeting logic that protects margin also produces cleaner data, and stores that ran targeted offers this year came out of the weekend actually able to say which offers worked, because the discounts were not smeared evenly across everything. Second, more of the traffic itself is arriving through channels that read before the shopper does, including AI assistants summarizing options. That does not change the discount math, but it raises the value of a store whose pricing is coherent enough to be summarized correctly.
The through-line across three seasons is simple enough to end on. The weekend keeps getting bigger, and that is the least controllable and least important fact about it. What you control is the structure of the discount, and the stores that treated BFCM as a margin problem rather than a revenue problem have been the ones still smiling in December, three years in a row.
For the strategic frame behind this year's results, our targeted-not-sitewide argument laid out the bet before the season, and the BFCM 2024 playbook is where the deep-or-wide thinking started. If you run one thing differently next year, make it the plan, not the depth.
