Black Friday, Christmas, Q5 — a strategy for the hot quarter

Four phases of the hot quarter — different goals, different rules

The biggest mistake is treating the whole November–January period as one long promotion. It’s four different games, where the user has different motivations and the competition has different budgets.

Each phase requires a different pricing strategy and a different narrative. We break them down below.

Black Week — the three-field strategy and Omnibus

Amadeusz put it bluntly during the debate: you can’t keep promoting the same products throughout November and December. The Omnibus Directive requires showing the lowest price from 30 days, so if you pull the same assortment into Black Week promotions and then again at Christmas, the second promotion will compare itself to the first and visually stop being a promotion.

Hence the three-field concept:

Amadeusz’s second rule: don’t try to run a promotion on 80% of your assortment at 5% off. No one will notice. Run 5% of your assortment at -40% — then you’re exceptional and you’ll actually land the deal-hunter.

Competitor prices as input to Google Ads campaigns

One of the strongest threads of the debate: competitor price analysis isn’t just a sales-team tool — it’s an input to decisions about ad budgets.

The mechanics: a customer clicks a product ad, lands on the product page, opens a new tab in a comparison engine. If you’re 15% more expensive than a competitor, you paid for the click — the sale goes elsewhere. Promoting products where you’re not price-competitive is budget burn.

The practical implementation Amadeusz described:

1. Label products by price attractiveness. Price analysis data feeds into the product feed — a product gets a “promote hard” label when you’re in the market’s top 3.
2. Campaign automation driven by labels. When the label appears, the product enters a higher-budget campaign. When it disappears, the budget moves to another product. That’s exactly how Dealavo’s pricing automation works — pricing rules enforced in real time on the basis of competitor data.
3. Reacting to a competitor selling out. If a competitor was cutting prices and ran out of stock, your price position suddenly becomes market-leading — an opportunity you only see thanks to daily market price analysis (standard once a day, more often during Black Week).

Karolina, speaking about Google Ads, flagged the same thing from the opposite side: after Black Friday don’t give up immediately, but don’t scale everything by raising the total budget. That’s not a strategy — it’s burning money. You scale only the products that are planned to drive the second wave of sales.

What to do with one-shot buyers after Black Friday

According to research cited during the debate, 77% of Black Friday purchases are one-off transactions — the customer buys once, uses the discount code and disappears. The standard post-purchase scenario won’t work on them, because they’re not interested in the brand — they’re interested in the price.

Julia proposed two mechanisms that genuinely convert a one-shot buyer into a returning customer:

• Loyalty points with a short expiry window. You award them for the Black Friday purchase, but they’re valid for 2–3 weeks. The FOMO that pulled the customer in the first time works a second time.
• Price drop scenario. If the customer viewed a product longer or added it to favourites, a price-drop trigger brings them back faster than any remarketing campaign.

Ewelina K. added two checkout touchpoints: a dedicated thank-you for the order (even offline, a note in the package) and an incentive to subscribe to the newsletter with a non-discount bonus (the discount has already been used; now a gift, an ebook, or early access does the work).

Omnibus as an ally, not an obstacle

The Omnibus Directive is often treated as a promotional constraint — Amadeusz reversed that logic during the debate. Omnibus enforces the discipline that protects the margin. If you can’t cut the same prices indefinitely, you must:

• plan promotional pools well in advance (see: the three-field strategy),
• set hard minimum margin thresholds below which you don’t go even in a competitive panic,
• have competitor price data so you know whether the discount is needed at all.

The minimum margin rule is a second key thread. Competitors often chase prices too low, not accounting for platform fees (Allegro, Amazon), return costs, payment-processing costs. Your goal isn’t to win every price auction — only the ones where winning makes business sense.

Last minute — delivery guarantee as an advantage, not just a message

The last week before Christmas Eve is no longer a price game — it’s a logistics game. The day before Christmas, the customer isn’t looking for the lowest price, they’re looking for certainty the package will arrive.

Amadeusz demonstrated this with a specific mechanism already running at larger players (MediaMarkt DE): a surcharge for express delivery via an on-demand courier. The customer will pay an extra 5–10 euros for same-day Bolt delivery. This isn’t a price race to the bottom — it’s letting the customer pay more to solve the “I won’t make it in time” problem.

Three things every store should do that week:

1. A delivery deadline on every product page, not just in checkout. “Order by 12:00 and you’ll get it before Christmas” needs to be visible where the customer makes the decision.
2. An alternative to delivery. Click & collect, gift card, in-store pickup — anything that lets the customer get the gift in a way other than by courier.
3. Availability data instead of promises. If a competitor has sold out, your offer can be more expensive and still win — provided you know the competitor sold out. That requires a daily analysis of competitor prices and stock levels.

Ewelina K. underlined one thing that can’t be skipped: a delivery promise must be deliverable. You lose a loyal customer once — a single undelivered gift costs more than 10 won price auctions.

Q5 — no-man’s-land where whoever has a strategy wins

Q5 is Google’s term for the 26 December – 15 January window. Ad bids clearly drop, most advertisers pull back, traffic is still there — but the user has entirely different needs than a week earlier.

Three segments worth addressing with separate communication:

Emilia pointed out a creative shortcut that saves production budget: the same product serves different needs. A coffee machine before Christmas is a gift (packaging, emotion, handing it over). The same machine in Q5 is “a quiet morning with coffee” or “fits in a small kitchen”. One photo shoot, two narratives, two segments.

Gift cards — a strategy for capturing a new customer

This is one of the most underrated areas in e-commerce. A gift card is a transaction in which the buyer and the recipient are two different people. Most stores only communicate with the buyer — the real opportunity is on the other side.

Julia laid this out as a concrete workflow:

1. Capture the recipient’s data when selling the e-card (if your T&Cs allow).
2. A dedicated onsite flow for whoever enters the gift-card code at checkout — a popup inviting them to the newsletter, a sign-up bonus (ebook, discount on a second order, early access), a clear “welcome, we’re glad you’re here” message.
3. A CRM scenario for the person who redeemed the card — product communication based on what they bought, not a standard welcome flow.

Amadeusz threw in a provocative thesis worth sitting with: some stores actually make money on unredeemed cards. It’s legal but strategically short-sighted — a customer who forgot about the card was never going to become a loyal one. Better to build a purchase ladder (“spend 200, get a 50 voucher; spend 400, get a 100 voucher”) and actively push redemption.

Cross-sell — top 5 expert products instead of AI across the board

Amadeusz left a concrete piece of homework in his wrap-up: take the 5 products you’ll be promoting in Black Week and manually design an expert cross-sell for them. 90% of stores Dealavo works with have automated cross-sell that makes no sense — drill with a drill, baby crib with a 3,000 display cabinet.

Cross-sell rules that genuinely raise margin:

• Price anchoring. A complementary product to a 200 item must be worth 20–60, not 400.
• Complementary, not substitute products. Phone → case. Bed → mattress. Coffee machine → capsules.
• Three suggestions, not eight. Decisions collapse with too many options.
• Clear compatibility information. “Fits X” — the customer doesn’t have to verify it themselves.

If you do this manually for 5 top products, you’ll see the difference in AOV. Then it makes sense to extrapolate to the rest of the assortment.

One last thing: don’t ship big IT changes during Black Week

Amadeusz said this half-jokingly, half-seriously, but it matters: vibe coding will blow up on Black Friday. Any significant IT change should land at least 2 weeks before Black Week, load-tested. A sales boom combined with an unprepared server is a scenario where you pay for traffic you can’t convert.

The same applies to video creative: Emilia recommended preparing Figma templates with ready-made slots for product, headline and CTA. During Black Week you swap the fields, you don’t design from scratch. Use AI video to change the ad opening, not to produce the whole spot — for products where the customer expects authenticity (handmade, cosmetics swatches), the “generated by AI” label genuinely lowers trust.