Black Friday sale playbook
How to prepare your store for Black Friday
Configure your store for a one-day-to-one-week promo by combining a discount coupon, an entry popup, an optional sitewide banner via Custom Codes, and a post-event analytics review.
This recipe is the standard pattern for running a Black Friday sale on an SGEN store. It combines six existing admin features into one ordered playbook.
No new functionality — this is the orchestration layer; each step links to the per-feature reference doc that has the click-by-click.
Total time: approximately 2 hours of focused setup plus 15 minutes per day during the sale to monitor, and 30 minutes after the sale for the analytics review.
What is this for?
A Black Friday sale is the canonical use case, but this playbook works for any one-shot or short-window promo: launch sale, end-of-season clearance, anniversary discount, or flash sale. The combination of features is the same every time: one coupon, one popup, optional banner, tracking verification, and an analytics review when the campaign closes.
Running these pieces in order matters. Create the coupon first so you have a code to put in the popup and banner copy before you open those forms. Build the popup second so visitors see the offer the moment they land on any page. Add the banner third if you want a persistent reminder visible on every page throughout the sale window. Verify tracking fourth so consent settings do not silently block your conversion data before orders start arriving. Then review everything the morning after the sale closes, starting with deactivation before you open any reports.
Good use cases
Example 1: your business runs a one-day Black Friday sale. $5 off any cart with code BLACKFRIDAY24, capped at an error page redemptions, advertised via an entry popup and a sitewide red banner. Active for 24 hours, deactivated after midnight. Post-event: the team reviews top traffic paths in Analytics → Reports to see which pages drove the most discounted orders.
Example 2: A returning-customer reactivation week. A small fixed-cart discount, a popup that fires on the homepage only, no sitewide banner because the audience is already familiar with the store. After the week ends, the team checks order volume in Ecommerce → Orders filtered to the promo dates and counts how many completed orders included the discount code.
Example 3: A new product launch — 3-day intro discount. $10 off the first cart, popup that fires on the new-product page only, sitewide banner for the 3-day window. Post-event review: the analytics dashboard filtered to the three launch days shows which pages visitors hit before reaching checkout, confirming the funnel worked as intended.
What NOT to use this for
SGEN coupons are cart-wide only — either Percentage of cart total or Fixed cart amount. There is no per-product or per-category discount field. The form does not include a product or category picker. (See Discount coupons for the full field list.)
The coupon form's own field hint reads: "Use Fixed cart discount. Percentage has a known issue — avoid for now." Use Fixed cart discount with a calculated dollar amount.
The form hint reads: "Leave blank. The expiry date field has a known issue being addressed." Instead, manually flip the coupon's Status to Draft when the sale ends.
If anything breaks, you will spend the weekend chasing it instead of monitoring. Test the full flow on a staging site first.
Coupons keep working until you either flip Status to Draft or move them to Trash. A "Black Friday only" code that is still live in February will be redeemed by anyone who still has it.
How this connects to other features
(Discount coupons) — the discount mechanism for this recipe. Cart-wide only; no per-product targeting.
(Create a popup) — the visitor-side announcement that fires on page load and shows the offer code.
(Custom Codes) — the sitewide banner injected as HTML across every page of the public site.
— can suppress GTM and other tracking-script firings during the sale; verify your sale-tracking still runs even with consent declined.
— post-event traffic and path analysis for the sale window; use the doughnut chart to see which pages drove the most activity.
— the inventory you are discounting; if you are temporarily marking products as featured for the sale, this is where you do that.
Before you start
Suggested setup timeline (working backwards from sale start):
Keeping setup off the day itself means any unexpected issues surface with time to fix them before traffic arrives.
- You are signed in to SGEN as an Administrator.
- The store has at least one purchasable product and the cart and checkout work end-to-end. Test with a small order before the sale starts.
- You have decided: the discount amount in dollars, the date range, the maximum total redemptions, and the campaign code such as
BLACKFRIDAY24. - You have your popup body copy and your sitewide banner copy written before you open the forms. Drafting inside the admin text editor is slower than pasting from a document.
- You have a test plan ready — a staging cart you will run through to verify the coupon applies before the sale goes live.
- If you plan to monitor conversions via Google Analytics or GTM, confirm those tags are firing on a test order before the sale starts, not after orders have already come in.
Where to go
The recipe touches five admin areas in this order:
- Ecommerce → Coupons → Add New — create the discount code (5 minutes)
- Popups → Add New — build the announcement popup (10 minutes)
- (Optional) Appearance → Custom Codes → Add New — sitewide banner (10 minutes)
- Tracking & Privacy → Settings — verify consent gating does not break sale tracking (5 minutes)
- After the sale: Analytics → Reports and Ecommerce → Orders — review (30 minutes)
Steps
Open Ecommerce → Coupons → Add New. Fill the Coupon Manage form:
- Coupon Code — short, uppercase, no spaces. Letters, numbers, hyphens only. Example:
BLACKFRIDAY24. - Description — internal note only; customers never see it. Use it to record the campaign name and end date for future reference.
- Discount Type — pick Fixed cart discount. The form hint explicitly recommends this over Percentage.
- Coupon Amount — the dollar amount subtracted from the cart subtotal.
5= $5 off. - Usage limit per coupon — the cap on total redemptions across all customers. Set this to limit the promo's blast radius, for example
an error page. - Usage limit per user — set to
1for one-per-customer promotions; leave blank for unlimited per-user. - Coupon Expiry Date — leave blank. The form hint reads "Leave blank. The expiry date field has a known issue being addressed." Flip Status to Draft manually when the sale ends.
- Status — Publish when you are ready to make it live, not before.
The form pre-filled with a BLACKFRIDAY24 example:
Click Create a Coupon. A success flash confirms the write:
After saving, the new coupon appears in Ecommerce → Coupons with a Publish status badge and a Uses counter starting at 0. Monitor this counter during the sale to confirm the cap is tracking correctly.
The All Coupons list after creating the Black Friday code (alongside two pre-existing coupons):
Verify it works — open a fresh private-browsing tab, add a product to your cart, and apply the code at checkout. The cart should show a discount line deducting the fixed amount from the subtotal. Do not skip this step — a coupon that is created but misconfigured will silently reject at checkout with no admin warning.
Source: Create discount coupons
Open Popups → Add New. The Create Popup form has Title (admin-only label), Editor (Text Editor or SG-Builder), Content (the popup body HTML), and Status. Sidebar configuration panels: Autoload (show on every page on first visit), Title Tag (H1-H6 / P), Width (minimum 350px).
Keep the popup focused: one headline, the code in bold, and a single link to the shop. Visitors who dismiss immediately still see the code, which is the goal. Avoid embedding a signup form inside the Black Friday popup — the friction slows people who are already headed to checkout.
The form pre-filled for a Black Friday popup:
The body HTML for the Black Friday popup with the code featured prominently:
<h2>Black Friday — $5 off any order</h2>
<p>Code <strong>BLACKFRIDAY24</strong> applied at checkout. Today only.</p>
<p><a href="/shop">Shop the sale →</a></p>Click Create a Popup. Set Status to Publish. The popup fires on every public page on first visit; subsequent visits within the same browser session do not re-fire. Test it in a fresh private-browsing tab to confirm it appears and that the close button works.
Source: Create a popup
If you want a thin always-visible bar across the top of every page during the sale, add a Custom Code snippet placed in the <body> Start position. Open Appearance → Custom Codes → Add New.
Use inline styles on the banner element rather than a separate <style> block. SGEN's Custom Codes sanitizer processes both, but inline styles are simpler to review and easier to copy and reuse next year with only the discount code updated.
A sitewide Black Friday banner using inline styles:
<div class="site-banner-blackfriday" style="position:relative;background:#d51522;color:#fff; padding:8px 16px;text-align:center;font-size:13.5px;"> Black Friday is here. $5 off any order — use code <strong>BLACKFRIDAY24</strong> at checkout. <a href="/shop" style="color:#fff;text-decoration:underline;margin-left:8px;"> Shop now → </a>
</div>Set Status to Active. The snippet renders into the chosen placement on every public page on next load.
When the sale ends, flip Status to Inactive rather than deleting the entry. You will want the same snippet next year with only the code updated. Keeping it as Inactive preserves the copy for reuse without it being visible on the public site.
Source: Add custom HTML, scripts, and tracking code
If your site has the cookie-consent banner enabled, your analytics scripts may be gated until visitors accept. During a sale, declined-consent visitors still purchase — but their orders will not appear in Google Analytics or GTM if those tags are consent-gated.
Open Tracking & Privacy → Settings. Scroll to the Exclusions section. Review each gate:
- Gate Google Tag Manager — if ON, GTM is suppressed until the visitor clicks Accept. Sale-conversion events will not fire for any visitor who declines or ignores the consent banner.
- Gate Microsoft Clarity — same behaviour; session recordings and heatmaps are blocked for declined visitors.
- Gate Session Attributer — SGEN's own campaign-attribution tracker is suppressed until Accept. This affects which traffic source gets credit for sale orders in Reports.
For the duration of the sale, decide which gates are essential vs. which you can soften. SGEN's own order data in Ecommerce → Orders is independent of consent settings — you will see every completed order regardless. Use the Orders list as your ground truth if Analytics numbers look unexpectedly low after the sale.
Source: Configure cookie consent
The morning after the sale ends, work through the following sequence. Turn everything off before opening any reports — this prevents additional redemptions landing while you are reading data.
a. Switch off the campaign assets first.
- Open Ecommerce → Coupons, find your
BLACKFRIDAY24row, click Edit, set Status to Draft, save. The code stops working on the next cart load. - Open Popups, find the announcement popup, click Edit, set Status to Draft, save.
- Open Appearance → Custom Codes, find the banner snippet, set Status to Inactive, save.
Once all three are off, open a fresh private-browsing tab and reload your homepage. Confirm the popup does not appear, the banner is gone, and a test cart rejects the code with an "invalid" message.
b. Review the traffic.
Open Analytics → Reports. Set the date range to the sale window. The doughnut chart shows the top paths during the sale — usually /shop, /cart, and any campaign landing page promoted in the popup or banner. The line chart shows the trend hour by hour or day by day across the sale window.
Filter Event Type to Page View for general traffic analysis. Filter to 404 Not Found to surface any broken links that sale traffic may have hit. Note any pages with unexpectedly high 404 counts — those are likely links in your popup or banner that need correcting before the next campaign.
c. Review the orders.
Open Ecommerce → Orders. Set the date range to the sale window. Each order row shows the coupon code applied and the discounted total. Click any order to see the full detail including the discount line, shipping, and the customer's name.
The Orders list for your business after a one-day Black Friday, filtered to Nov 28:
After reviewing orders, note the final Uses count on the BLACKFRIDAY24 coupon row. This number is the authoritative redemption count for the campaign. Record it in the coupon's Description field alongside the date for next year's comparison.
Sources: Traffic reports, Manage products list
What success looks like
Every feature activated in this recipe has a clear target state. The table below shows the expected status of each asset at the end of the sale window: Specific confirmation checks:
- A test cart with the coupon code applied shows the discount line on the cart subtotal — verified in a private-browsing tab before the sale goes live.
- The popup fires on a fresh private-browsing visit to the homepage and displays the correct code and call-to-action link.
- (If used) The Custom Codes banner is visible on every public page during the sale window and disappears immediately after flipping Status to Inactive.
- After the sale: coupon Status is Draft, popup Status is Draft, banner Status is Inactive — confirmed by opening each admin screen and checking the status column.
- Analytics Reports show a traffic spike during the sale window with the top paths matching the pages promoted in the popup and banner.
- Orders list filtered to the sale dates shows the expected volume of completed orders, with the coupon code column populated on the majority of rows.
- The Coupons list Uses counter incremented to match the number of orders that applied the code, confirming the redemption cap was enforced correctly.
What to do if it does not work
Confirm Status is Publish in the coupon edit form. If you set Usage limit per coupon, check the Uses column in the Coupons list — the cap may already be reached. If you set Usage limit per user, that customer may have used the code in an earlier session.
Common causes: popup Status is Draft; consent banner is gating the script that triggers popups; or the visitor already saw the popup once in this browser session (Autoload only fires on first visit per session). Test in a fresh private-browsing tab to isolate session state.
Confirm Status is Active in the Custom Codes list. Hard-refresh the public page (Ctrl+Shift+R on Windows, Cmd+Shift+R on Mac) — the page may have been served from cache before the snippet activated.
Most likely cause: tracking-consent decline rate is high and the analytics scripts are consent-gated. Cross-check against Ecommerce → Orders — SGEN's own order data is independent of consent. If Orders shows completed purchases but Analytics shows zero events, the consent gate is the cause.
Refresh-cache lag at the customer's browser end. Wait 5–10 minutes; new redemptions stop. Existing carts that were already at the checkout page when you flipped Status may complete — this is expected behaviour.
Confirm the order reached a completed or processing state. Orders abandoned at the checkout page do not count as redemptions and do not decrement the cap.
Anti-patterns
- Don't activate this recipe on a Friday after 5 pm. If anything breaks, you will spend the weekend chasing it instead of monitoring the sale.
- Don't skip the staging-cart verification. Run through every recipe step on a staging or test site first. Some configurations have hidden side effects on adjacent features that only appear when all pieces are live together.
- Don't forget the deactivation plan. Every feature you activate for this recipe needs a clear "turn it off" step when the campaign ends. The deactivation list in step 5a is the canonical sequence — copy it to a task list before the sale starts so it is ready the morning after.
- Don't rely on the Expiry Date field. The coupon form warns that this field has a known issue. Always deactivate the coupon manually by flipping Status to Draft when the sale ends.
- Don't set a Percentage discount for a high-volume sale. The form warns against it. Stick to Fixed cart discount for predictable margin control and to avoid the known issue with the Percentage type.
Next step
Citations (audit trail)
Every step above traces to one of these existing per-feature reference docs. The demos embedded above use fictional-but-clearly-so data: your business, and customer names an editor, a teammate, a developer, an admin, an analyst. Products used in mocks: Canvas Tote Bag, Barista T-Shirt, your detailed content piece, Coffee Sticker Pack.