Hi Team!
It’s the last full week of October, and the inboxes can feel it. Every brand you’ve ever bought one thing from is warming up the same email.
Early access, VIP preview, “our biggest sale of the year,” in all caps, somehow bigger than last year’s biggest sale of the year.
Don’t get me wrong, I love a deal. But the same brands that spend eleven months talking about loyalty are about to spend four weeks teaching their best customers to wait for the next code. I don’t think the math on that trade ever gets done.
Let’s get into it.
This week’s newsie is brought to you by my friends at Horatio!
Nothing beats watching the numbers climb on Black Friday. And nothing undoes that feeling faster than opening the support inbox the following Monday.
What rarely makes it into the BFCM planning deck is that your team’s busiest stretch comes after the sale. Packages stall in transit, and anxious customers reach out on email, chat, and Instagram, often about the same order.
Then the returns, gift swaps, and size exchanges start arriving. And right after your seasonal help wraps up, January brings a pile of chargebacks.
Each of these chips away at the revenue you worked hard for. Left unmanaged, the post-peak surge can quietly erase up to 30% of the margin you gained during BFCM.
The tricky part is that most brands don’t see where they’re vulnerable until they’re already underwater. Once response times have stretched from hours to days and your best agents are exhausted, it’s too late to fix the process. You’re just trying to get through the week.
The brands that come out of Q4 with their margins (and their team) intact decided ahead of time what to keep in-house and what to hand off.
That’s why Horatio created The Q4 Survival Guide for E-Commerce Brands.
It covers the three post-peak profit leaks: WISMO, returns, and chargebacks. It also includes a 12-question stress test that shows where your operation is most likely to crack and what to do about it, all without hiring a single new employee.
Take the stress test now, while there’s still time to act on your score. 👇
The training program nobody admits to running
Every brand says they want loyal customers. Then they run 40% off every six weeks and act surprised when nobody buys at full price.
What they’ve actually built is a customer who likes the product and has figured out, correctly, that the sale comes on a schedule.
The cycle usually goes the same way. Revenue dips, someone panics, a bigger code goes out, and everyone celebrates when the graph recovers for a week.
Meanwhile, customers who would have bought anyway are learning that full price is for people who forgot to check their inbox.
The coupon tax
Here’s the math we often don’t discuss:
Take a $100 order with a 40% gross margin, so $60 of product cost. Full price, that’s $40 of gross profit. Run 25% off and the same order, same cost, same mix, makes $15.
To book the same gross profit dollars, you now need to sell almost three times as many units. If the code doesn’t get you there, the bigger discount just made you poorer.
And a customer who only shows up at 40% off is telling you what they came for.
When the discount is the right answer
None of this means that there’s no use case for discounting. Clearing genuinely dead inventory is a legitimate reason to run one, and a first-order discount can make sense when the acquisition economics work.
Just remember that the first price someone pays becomes part of how they value the product. And when the same person gets the welcome offer for the fourth time, acquisition economics have become retention economics.
A real thank you that happens once, an anniversary or a milestone, still feels like a gift. Run the same gesture every six weeks, and customers stop reading it as a thank you. The code is a tool, and the problem starts when it’s the only tool you reach for.
What a reason to come back looks like
If the only reason to buy again is a lower price, that’s the whole relationship. The brands people actually come back to give their customers a reason beyond price.
Pull your order data first: what do customers buy after the hero product? If people who buy X usually come back for Y, test it. Run a bundle pairing them, or a gift with purchase aimed at customers who bought X and never came back for Y.
Digital gifts can do the same job when there is no second product to give: a guide, a template, or exclusive content that goes out with the order and still feels like a gift.
Whichever you run, worth testing it against a holdout and look at contribution margin over the next few purchase cycles. If those customers were going to buy the second product anyway, you’ve effectively paid them to do it sooner.
Same with recognition. A customer’s twelfth order should feel different from a stranger’s first. That can look like a note, a small gift, or just a human noticing that they’ve been around for years. An email that says you’ve ordered this twelve times, this one’s on us, lands differently than 15% off today only.
BFCM is for them too
The person who paid full price in September is about to watch you hand 30% off to complete strangers for four straight weeks. The people who give you the most predictable revenue often get the least exciting treatment. And somehow we call this a loyalty strategy.
Start with your own history too. Pull up what you offered last BFCM and the year before: your long-term customers remember it better than you do. If last year was 40% off sitewide, that may be their reference point.
A smaller discount can still win if you explain and test the value of the different offer instead of assuming the bundle speaks for itself.
You don’t have to skip the sale. BFCM is real and the revenue matters. But the customers who already carry your business deserve a version that feels built for them: real early access instead of a subject line that says early access, first dibs on the thing that sells out every year, an actual gift with the order.
Last week was the boring basics: a good product, a fair price, showing up when you said you would. This week is what happens when the promo calendar starts undermining all three.
Before the sale starts, pull up the customers who bought repeatedly over the last twelve months. Look at how often they paid full price, how their behavior changes around your promotions, and what happened to them after last year’s BFCM. If you want customers buying at full price in January, spend a little less time teaching them that November is the only sensible time to shop.
Give your best customers something to come back for besides the next code.
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 💛
