It’s Time To Start Outlining Sales for Black Friday and Cyber Monday – 2025 Edition

The fourth quarter can be a goldmine for parts and accessories ecommerce, but only if you plan ahead. With warnings about reduced consumer spending this Q4 and online competition at an all-time high, it’s smart to prepare now to maximize revenue.

In this post we’ll map out suggested promotions, creative strategy, and related “stuff” for Black Friday, Cyber Monday, and the holiday selling season.

Key Sale Dates For Q4 2025

Here’s the lineup you should be planning for:

Halloween – October 31st

A lot of retailers run a “Black Friday Preview” sale for Halloween. It’s a bold move – one we don’t necessarily endorse – but there’s logic to it. A substantial portion of consumers spend their entire gift budget before Black Friday.

Still, if you run an aggressive sale on October 31st, sale fatigue can set in before December.

Veteran’s Day – Tuesday, November 11th

A surprisingly high percentage of DIY’ers are current and former military, which makes Veteran’s Day especially important for the parts and accessories industry. The creative should be respectful and understated, and there should be an extra for current and former military above and beyond what the general public will receive.

Black Friday – Friday, November 28th

This is one of the biggest sales of the year – don’t hold back on discounts or special offers. Also, don’t hesitate to start the sale on Monday the 24th or Wednesday the 27th.

Small Business Saturday – Saturday, November 29th

If you’ve promoted your brand as a small, family run company, you can remind your customers you’re a small business as part of your Black Friday promotion. If you’re a big brand (or your customers perceive you as a big brand), sit this one out.

Cyber Monday & Cyber Week – Monday, December 1st to Friday, December 5th

Most companies simply extend their Black Friday sale/offer into the following week. That way people who didn’t jump at your best offers on Black Friday don’t feel like they missed out.

Green Monday – Monday, December 8th

It might feel odd to run the same Black Friday/Cyber Monday sale all the way through the 9th, but a lot of companies will do it. “Cyber Monday Sale Extended” is a great way to explain why the sale runs a little longer.

Other companies will promote this as a “Last Chance For Guaranteed Delivery” sale and run it through the guaranteed shipping cutoff day.

End of Year Clearance & New Year’s Sale – Friday, December 26th to Monday Jan. 5th

The last week of December is usually a great week, as many consumers are looking for deals. Most brands will run an “End of Year Blowout” sale or similar this week that overlaps New Year’s.

Also, don’t end this sale on January 1st – hold it through the following Monday. A lot of your customers will be out of the office the 1st through the 4th. A surprising percentage of online buyers use their employer’s computer to place online orders, which means the first day they’ll be able to buy is the 5th.

Marketing Activities That Move the Needle

Email – Plan multiple emails per promo event – “Sale starts now”, “Sale going on now, and “Last chance!” are all recommended.

Social Media – Post at least as often as you email, and use video, product spotlights, and countdown graphics to drive engagement.

Sale Specific Facebook & Instagram Ad Campaigns – Sale-specific creative is key. Usually, images get the best results, and we’ve seen good results with vehicle make-model specific versions of graphics (e.g. making multiple versions of the same ad, but with different vehicles shown).

Google Ads – While it will rarely make sense to launch new Google Ads campaigns during sale periods, there are some things to remember:

• ROAS will probably be higher during the sale, so feel free to bump up the daily budgets during the sale period
• Sale-specific creative can be scheduled in just about every type of campaign
• Promotion ad extensions can be scheduled at the account level, which is a quick and easy way to get a performance lift

Countdown Timers, Offer Bars, and Overlays – A sticky holiday themed promo bar or overlay is a generally effective. Some important tips:

• Test whatever you’re using on desktop and mobile – make sure they’re not covering up important elements or interfering with normal use.
• Make sure they don’t cause layout shifts that can irritate users.
• Make sure the user won’t see the offer more than once per session, at least if they intentionally close the offer.
• Email capture is a best practice, but during big sale periods it’s best to get the order. Maximize revenue by putting the code where people can find it, even if they don’t submit an address.

Planning and Creating Your Creative

Once you’ve come up with your sale calendar and identified all the activities you’re going to do, it’s time to work on creative.

You can do something sort of subtle – like the Jegs banner below showing a holiday gift on a workbench alongside some products:

Or, you can do something off the wall…we used ChatGPT to generate all of these graphics. Each of these need work, but the idea is that with A.I. there aren’t many limitations.

Finally, once you come up with a couple of designs you like for each sale, you can make a few sizes and drop the graphics into emails, social media posts, and ad campaigns.

Other Tips and Suggestions

We’ve been helping clients with Black Friday and Cyber Monday sales for nearly 20 years, and there are a few “gotchas” you can plan for to make life easier.

Check your discount codes. Check them incognito, check them logged in, check them against other offers, etc.

Offer gift cards. If someone who wants to buy an accessory as a gift – but doesn’t know what to buy – a gift card is the answer. We’ve never had a client who sold a lot of gift cards (usually gift cards are a single digit percentage of sales), but every dollar counts.

Check your offer bars. We mentioned it above, but test your overlays and offer bars. They can block cart buttons, checkout buttons, etc. Check them on desktop and mobile.

Plan for the last guaranteed shipping day cut off. Each year FedEx and UPS will announce their “last day for guaranteed delivery” cutoff date, and each year there’s a lot of uncertainty as the cutoff day approaches. For UPS, the 2025 “UPS Ground” cut-off date should be December 18th. For FedEx and the US Post Office, it might be several days earlier (one source says December 13th!).

Make sure your shipping and return policy pages are up to date, and check your FAQs page too. Customer service is often swamped during the holiday season, and you can save them a lot of heartache now by reviewing the shipping, return, and FAQ pages and making sure they’re clear and complete. A little effort now might save the support team a few dozen emails or calls later.

Also, while you’re at it, add some info about holiday shipping cutoff dates to your shipping policy page (December 13th is a very conservative target), and consider extending the return window for the holidays as well (gives your support staff more time).

SEMA will eat up a lot of your time between now and Black Friday. The SEMA show eats into everyone’s calendars in October, and when it’s over it can take a few days to recover. If you can plan your Q4 now, November won’t be so hard (SEMA setup starts October 30th and ends Nov. 7th).

Plan for your staff to be out. The holiday season is cold and flu season. Kids have lots of time off from school in November and December. A lot of us will travel to different states to see our families – or have family come and stay for a few days. It’s smart to assume your team will be less available as Black Friday approaches.

Set expectations now for last minute requests. If you work in marketing like we do, you know how disruptive a last minute change request can be. We suggest locking down the sale calendar with the executive team now, and then writing down a due-date for each sale. This can limit (or possibly even eliminate) last minute requests.

If you’re a brand, don’t forget the dealers. As much as brands try to plan ahead (see above), dealers/retailers often don’t learn about the details of a sale until a couple of days before it starts. As a result, they don’t have time to properly promote every sale they learn about.

But if a dealer is notified a week (or even 2 weeks) before, they can put together banners, schedule emails, etc. By giving the dealers more notice, the more participation you’ll get from them.

NOTE: If you don’t want to give the dealers the discount info until the last possible minute, you can still give them some banners, the sale start and end dates, and a rough idea of what will be on sale.