Hi Team!
This newsie comes to you from UA85, a 12-hour flight from TLV to EWR after three days in Israel for a wedding. I managed to eat my weight in hummus and rugelach while I was there, so by my standards it was a pretty successful trip.
Black Friday is a few weeks away, and I suspect this might be the hardest BFCM in years.
The spending forecasts actually look pretty healthy. The National Retail Federation expects holiday retail sales to grow 4.2% this year. There's money to be made, and plenty of brands are preparing to spend a fortune convincing customers to give them some of it.
And in our brave new world, AI can (sometimes) produce beautiful ads, completely re-engineer a PDP, etc.
That being said, competitors have the same tools, and customers are noticing how alike everything sounds. From the tone to the visuals, to the same promises being made everywhere.
A Gartner survey recently found that 65% of consumers believe brands are producing too much AI-generated content in their marketing materials, and 57% say this content has made them less trusting of brand messaging overall.
Shoppers will compare dozens of offers and reviews, trying to work out who deserves their money. The signals they once relied on are easier than ever to manufacture.
I think this BFCM will expose the difference between brands that look good and brands that deliver.
There are three places I'd be paying particularly close attention to over the next few weeks.
Let's get into it.
This week’s newsie is brought to you by my friends at Horatio!
If you’ve read the last few issues, you know Horatio has been sharing a lot to help e-commerce brands get through BFCM in one piece: fewer backlogs, faster returns, and fewer chargebacks slipping through the cracks.
But getting through peak season is only half the job. The real payoff is when the customers you win in November are still buying from you in March.
That gets decided when wrong-size gifts start coming back and first-time buyers notice a subscription charge they forgot they signed up for. After weeks of nonstop volume, the instinct is to clear the queue as fast as possible: approve the refund, send the label, close the ticket.
It feels efficient, but every auto-refund that could have been an exchange is revenue walking out the door, usually along with a customer you won’t see again.
The brands that protect their long-term margins treat their queue as a retention opportunity, not a cleanup job. And they set it up before the rush, not in the middle of it.
That’s where the Post-Holiday Retention Guidebook by Horatio comes in. It shows you how to sort post-holiday tickets by root cause, turn returns into exchanges, get ahead of WISMO, and give first-time buyers a real reason to come back.
Grab it now, while there’s still time to put it to work. 👇
Your best-looking ad has a lot of competition
A growing number of ads in my feed are starting to look interchangeable. Immaculate lighting, immaculate people, and a script you could use for a skincare serum or a water bottle if you changed three nouns.
Now add BFCM, with every brand pushing its biggest sale and customers scrolling through dozens of near-identical promises.
I still stop for the customer unboxing something while a toddler screams in the background, or the founder walking around the warehouse with an iPhone explaining why the product had to change.
A shaky camera is easy to imitate. I care more about what the creator knows. How do the jeans fit after a wash? What's hard to clean? What would they change after a month?
Before BFCM, I'd ask a few creators to talk about the product the way they'd explain it to a friend who was about to spend their own money. Show the setup step that trips people up, the sizing issue, or the part that impressed them.
Then test those videos against your polished creative with the same offer and comparable audiences. Look at conversion and contribution margin alongside attention. There is no prize for making a scrappy ad that gets watched and sells nothing.
To sum it up: authenticity will be the thing that makes you stand out.
Your reviews have a harder job this year
A 5.0 average with four hundred reviews that all use the same three adjectives looks a little sus in 2026.
Sometimes that's generated copy. Sometimes it's just the result of asking everyone "How was it?" and collecting four hundred variations of "Amazing!"
During BFCM, that matters even more. Someone comparing three brands with similar products, similar discounts, and similar shipping offers needs some way to decide which one to trust.
The reviews (and AI review summary) I read tell me the parts the PDP forgot.
"Runs half a size small, order up."
"Took three weeks before I noticed any difference."
A photo of the pan on someone's mismatched stove, with a note about whether the handle gets hot.
A three-star review with a thoughtful brand response can be especially useful when you can see what happened next.
I'd even consider adding a custom question to the post-purchase review request to "What's one thing you wish you'd known before ordering?"
That should beat another wall of "Love it." Make those answers easy to find on PDPs, especially for products you're pushing during BFCM.
And please leave the critical reviews up. Respond with specifics and fix the recurring issues they expose. If fifteen people mention the same sizing problem, updating the size guide is probably worth more than writing the sixteenth polite reply.
The apology is beautiful
A customer reports a missing refund and gets a beautifully written apology in seconds, complete with the assurance that the team is taking it seriously. Nine days and three follow-ups later, they still haven't received their money.
The copy was great, though.
I recently wrote about the rainmaker role and the importance of giving someone enough authority to handle complicated customer moments. What concerns me heading into BFCM is how easy it's become to give customers the feeling of ownership without anyone actually owning the problem.
"I've escalated this to our team" sounds reassuring. Did anybody get the case? Who follows up, or does the customer have to ask again on Thursday?
Now multiply that by holiday order volume, delivery deadlines, and gifts that have to arrive on time.
A missing replacement in July is frustrating. A missing replacement three days before Christmas has a slightly different level of urgency.
I suspect a lot of brands are heading into BFCM with impressive automation metrics and some fairly questionable resolution processes underneath them.
Before the holiday rush, I'd pull twenty escalations that were marked resolved and follow them all the way through. Did the refund actually land? Did the replacement ship? Was the customer told when the promise changed?
I'd be more interested in those answers than an inbox full of perfectly phrased replies.
What I'd be checking before Black Friday
I'd check the creative you are about to spend money on for useful buying information, then look at whether your PDPs and Q&A’s and reviews answer the questions customers repeatedly ask.
Finally, audit the escalations you mark resolved. A closed ticket means very little to someone still waiting on an order.
None of these require a massive project before BFCM. They're worth addressing while there's still room to fix something.
I'm happy for all of us to keep using AI. But customers are getting better at questioning what they see: ads are easy to generate, glowing reviews are easy to write, and apologies arrive instantly.
The product still has to work, the reviews have to help, and the company has to follow through.
BFCM might break sales records. I'd be more interested in which brands keep those customers happy once the offers expire and the orders start arriving.
That's it for this week!
Any topics you'd like to see me cover in the future?
Just shoot me a DM or an email!
Cheers,
Eli 💛
