BFCM 2025 Results: What Really Happened This Weekend

[00:00:00] Taylor Holiday: We're sitting here on Wednesday and overall it was a really great weekend. I was concerned, I'm gonna be honest, I, I was worried that there was going to be some underperformance relative to the expectations that customers had had, mainly due to the first couple of months of November, or first couple of weeks of November weren't the best.

But overall really good weekend to expectation. Some stats we were plus 7% on total revenue plus 10% on new customer revenue. Always a good sign, plus 4% on returning revenue, plus 13% on contribution margin and 0.04% to total spend. So, what I'll say is that this is just continues to be a testament.

Our team's worked their butts off this weekend, man in Slack, like grinding every hour using our hourly tracker, making sure that we are doing the thing that we said we're going to do. And so you see the, the spend being within, let's see, 0.04% on tens of millions of dollars is. Is amazing. 

[00:00:51] Richard Gaffin: All right folks. Welcome to the Ecommerce Playbook Podcast. I'm your host, Richard Gaffin, Director of Digital Product Strategy here at Common Thread Collective, and I'm joined today. He's coming to us live with his brand new John Madden. Tony Romo headset from the booth, Mr. Taylor Holiday, checking in with us.

Taylor, what's going on, man?

[00:01:06] Taylor Holiday: I am just not built for a static mic, Richard. I'm just not, I'm not built for it, so I don't have the body control. So we're, we're going full Tony Romo headset to try and improve audio quality.

[00:01:17] Richard Gaffin: that's right.

[00:01:17] Taylor Holiday: We've had, we've, we've multiple times been down this path. I think this is gonna be the solution. I got. My wires wired up here into multiple devices, but that's not what we're here to talk about.

We're here to talk about. A Black Friday recap and we're, we're a day late. I, and I have to hit on this because we are a day late in getting this data out because our spreadsheet, man, the wizard that would be responsible for aggregating this data was not available to us. He was off competing in the Excel World Championships live in Las Vegas.

So shout out to Elgin man. Held it down. Got a incredibly different difficult puzzle from the genius, Harry Gross puzzle creator,

[00:01:57] Richard Gaffin: Yeah,

[00:01:58] Taylor Holiday: battled it out on the global stage, live in Las Vegas, and that's just the kind of talent that's running around this joint. Richard,

[00:02:04] Richard Gaffin: Exactly right, Larry. Right. This our, our BFCM data is being put together by a professional and in fact a

[00:02:10] Taylor Holiday: what of the world's

[00:02:11] Richard Gaffin: the highest level. Exactly. Yeah. It was a, a fascinating stream to watch just because I don't know anything about the Excel community at large and the things people were getting roasted about and things people were cheering for.

I gotta say,

[00:02:23] Taylor Holiday: so just remember if you're, you're out there building a spreadsheet today. You are a hobbyist and there is, there are professionals, but the spreadsheet that we have here today is actually amazing too. Like, I, I, I, honestly, I both, both, we have a couple of people that are just so good at this. So, we have a really cool view into how our Black Friday, cyber Monday weekend went.

And we're gonna dive and slice in that data, overlay it a little bit with some macro data that we've seen come in and jam with you guys about how this weekend went.

[00:02:51] Richard Gaffin: Okay, so let's let's dive right into it then, starting with Black Friday. Well, so, I mean, I, I dunno how you wanna break this

[00:02:56] Taylor Holiday: Let's go macro. Let's go Full overview first. We're sitting here on Wednesday and overall it was a really great weekend. I was concerned, I'm gonna be honest, I, I was worried that there was going to be some underperformance relative to the expectations that customers had had, mainly due to the first couple of months of November, or first couple of weeks of November weren't the best.

ut overall really good weekend to expectation. Some stats we were plus 7% on total revenue plus 10% on new customer revenue. Always a good sign, plus 4% on returning revenue, plus 13% on contribution margin and 0.04% to total spend. So, what I'll say is that this is just continues to be a testament.

Our team's worked their butts off this weekend, man in Slack, like grinding every hour using our hourly tracker, making sure that we are doing the thing that we said we're going to do. And so you see the, the spend being within, let's see, 0.04% on tens of millions of dollars is. Is amazing. And overall delivering positive to the outcome.

So we like, we like to think of great forecasting on large numbers as sort of plus or minus 10% everywhere. So plus seven on total revenue, plus 12 on contribution margin if you're gonna miss, miss that direction. But overall a really strong weekend when we had some brands due to some really good work.

[00:04:08] Richard Gaffin: Yeah. Okay. So let's talk about then maybe staying with the macro picture. Some like big stories maybe about what happened kind of over the weekend. So, I mean, I know there's, there's certain instances where somebody would swapped out an offer and that kind of turned things around. Also, like one standout metric here is our app Loving Spend was more than a hundred percent of what, of expectation.

Meaning that it delivered in a way that we weren't. Maybe we, we hoped for but weren't fully expecting. So let's talk about some of those, like those stories maybe that came outta the weekend.

[00:04:38] Taylor Holiday: Yeah. App Lab in Q4 will continues to be a big winner where we've seen real scale get produced on a meaningful basis. It's one of the few places where I can see brands going from hundreds of dollars to spend to tens of thousands of dollars to spend really quickly in those moments. And so it gets priority and attention as an ancillary channel because of that scale potential.

And we saw a few brands get there, and so, really good signs that it's gonna continue to be, you know, we're seeing it show up as like number three in Share of Wallet these days behind Google and Meta. And I think it's gonna continue to hold that position YouTube right there, neck and neck, and then TikTok kind of in the fifth position.

But really strong results. We're gonna continue to. Provide brands opportunity. The team over there just grinds too, like, at, at, at, they're, they're in Slack. They're working with you. They're giving you practical advice on the ad account. They're giving you meta or, or different end card adjustments and opportunities.

So they work hard to try and deliver real value. They're not afraid of a good holdout study. They'll, they'll really want to make sure that the spend is incremental. So good work overall on that side. And I think that sort of contributes to this. Overarching narrative that new customer revenue was strong.

And this weekend tends to, I think get overused as a time to sort of drive value off your existing customer base. And that's certainly true. We see overall revenue was almost exactly 50 50. This is another really interesting, in terms of the overall revenue was almost exactly 50 50 new customer and returning customer revenue.

But overall stronger new customer performance than anticipated with some brands doing like, just a lot, a lot better than they thought they could. And that gets us a little bit into the sequence of it all where. There was a weird thing that happened and sometimes this happens in meta's pacing, where Friday was really strong.

It was a good day. Saturday though was the one that was like really an outlier in terms of new customer acquisition performance. if I sort this by Saturday here, new customer revenue was plus 16%. New orders were plus 20%. On that Saturday spend on that day was plus 15%, so we were just able to drive a lot more volume on the Saturday than we anticipated where Cyber Monday ended up being a little bit softer in comparison. 

[00:06:43] Richard Gaffin: Interesting. Okay, so let's talk about obviously like. In terms of our sort of clientele's performance, we were basically spot on in terms of Target. It was a good, it was a overall, a good BFCM weekend. Talk about like, how does that play into some of like the broader trends across the industry that we saw over this

[00:06:59] Taylor Holiday: Yeah. Some of the data that I've seen coming in, adobe puts out a good study. I was listening to my guy Scott Galloway, breaking down consumer demand last night. And one of the things that's come up is that revenue was roughly plus 7%, but orders were actually negative. So in terms of total volume, what you get is less total purchases at slightly higher prices is functionally the story that you can get there.

So you, it's a little bit of an inflationary environment where the overall. Growth might be less than it seems. A couple of other interesting data points that I've seen come out is that buy now pay later usage was up a ton. And in the demographic of like 25 to to 40, it was something like 40% of purchase usages or something like crazy number amongst the younger generation of how much buy now pay, pay later usage.

There is,

[00:07:50] Richard Gaffin: Mm-hmm.

[00:07:51] Taylor Holiday: this is just I think one of the hidden. Problems of our industry. I was you. You ever listen to Caleb Hammer? Richard?

[00:07:57] Richard Gaffin: I don't think so.

[00:07:58] Taylor Holiday: So he's like financial audits of like with people on X and he's like, great, just hammers like to borrow the pun, he just berates them. But these people just talk about how like often they're buying things with a firm and it whatever, and it's just like way outside their budget.

But because it's 0% interest and you can defer the payment and it's just like wild how much this is woven into the consumer fabric. So. I think overall not the best signals from the consumer economy on a broad basis. And I think the reality is like when we talk about our performance to the target, so much of what we are working with our customers to do is the level set to normalize the expectations.

And so, I, if I look at year over year growth, I think I'm gonna, I'm gonna try and pull some of those numbers here in a second to see, see where we ended up. But I think our dataset mimicked something very similar where I think we were up like 9% overall, but orders were something like one or 2%. And so you saw a little bit of this almost like it's almost price growth, a little bit baked in to what's happening.

But, and massive year over year growth is not not to be expected.

[00:09:01] Richard Gaffin: Okay, so then I, I think like there's some, a couple specific things. Let, let's talk like maybe tactically. What the lessons were over the weekend. You know, regardless of like, maybe which particular day, but like, we had a couple, for instance, I'm thinking around we had one client who was used a promo code in in their offer and we're seeing like very poor year over year performance.

They switched it to Sitewide that basically saved their entire BFCM weekend. Anything else, like a kind of along those lines that we can pull out?

[00:09:31] Taylor Holiday: Yeah, so I think this is really the key is that. One of the things going into this weekend, and this is one of the things I notice very distinctly between the cultures of the different organizations that we work with, is that there are groups for whom the completion of the work is a task that has to be done.

Where in other words, they build and plan and their their event, they do their design work, they submit it, and then it's sort of like what will be will be. And that's the cultural disposition to the work. And sometimes that can be effective and they tend to plan more. They tend to be further out in front, but they're also far less adaptive to where if you were to say, Hey, Saturday we're changing the sale, that just would be like, culturally an impossibility like that would not happen because of the way things work.

And then alternatively, there's people who view the work as a mechanism to an outcome. And for them, like the work is not done until the outcome is achieved, and the actual relationship between those things is very different. And these are real cultural distinctions between the organizations we work with.

And I'd say we try to push ourselves to be as much as possible in the first or the second camp where it's like the amount of work required is whatever is necessary to achieve the e outcome. How many emails do you send? Well, however many you need to get to the goal. Is the offer good? Well, did it work?

Those are the only things that we use to assess. So if it's Saturday. And your coupon code offer isn't working. Yes, you rip down every ad, you change the homepage, you redesign all the emails, and you resend it. But that's hard to work. Not everybody's in that pattern of expectation and so. But there were a number of cases where we were very diligently engaging with the customer on, Hey, this is not resonating.

Conversion rate is softer than last year. We tried to go a different route with the sale. We need to avert, overhauling the entirety of the offer to get back on track. To get back on course. I know one brand in particular where it was on the new customer acquisition side, it was just the offer was not a strong relative to maybe what competitors were doing.

Looking and going, Hey, there's better offers in the market for the same thing. We have to up our game. There were other instances where they were trying to do a gift with purchase and the gift with purchase just wasn't compelling. And sometimes you have to sort of look in the mirror, allow the conversion rate to be reality and go, Hey, they don't want this.

And we swept it out. We got it outta the way, went to a full sitewide discount, and was able to recoup a lot of the goal. That was the screenshot I shared on X during the week. So that kind of engagement is what a partner like us exists to do, and what really the disposition of the best organizations is that.

Forecastings and exercise and execution it, the job's not done until the outcomes achieved, and that's how you have to approach this weekend because you can make huge gains. Just making those kinds of pivots in the moment.

[00:12:14] Richard Gaffin: Yeah. Well, I think like one lesson that I sort of pulled out of this was in, in kind of in line with what you're, with, what you're saying here is that a lot of the times I think organizations are hesitant around that sort of pivot because at other parts of the year it doesn't pay off. I mean, that's specific type of pay pivot where I'm saying, let's rework the ads, let's change the offer, let's do this and that, and let's do it last minute.

Let's do it right now. There's some sort of seasonal thing happening where people just aren't buying anything right now, so it's, it's whatever. On Black Friday, that's not the case at all. Everybody's just there ready to buy your stuff. And so any that sort of pivot, like any pivot and positive direction could have like a really outsized result.

[00:12:52] Taylor Holiday: That's right. And, and the reality is if you're not generating revenue, it's a you problem. Like, 'cause in this moment people are buying and so to your point, there's a very high leverage. Value to be had against a new action. And if your conversion rate is down, it's not some macro problem people are buying right now.

We can see it everywhere. You have a problem, you need to fix your problem. And so I think it's a, it's easiest to get people anchored in that, in that time because it's so, whereas if it's September 4th, it's easy to sort of be like, yeah, well it's, you know, the season and then blah, blah. And there's no like obvious trend that everybody's buying right now.

But in this moment, it's fix it, get it better, make it happen, and don't wait. Right. To, to to get after it.

[00:13:38] Richard Gaffin: Yeah. Well, let's, let's maybe stay on like, so any other sort of type of lesson or sort of tactical learning that you feel like really

[00:13:44] Taylor Holiday: Yeah. Delivery, I think meta delivery, there was a lot of conversation about that as another thing, which is that, again, this is another moment where there's the plan and then there's the backup plan and the backup to the backup plan, which is that. And this is the thing I think people have to start to do, which is I think that every time somebody says, oh my gosh, meta screwed me, or Meta delivery didn't work, what I hear.

Is, oh, you don't actually understand the game you're playing and you weren't prepared because you should assume on Black Friday, cyber Monday weekend that you're gonna have a delivery challenge at some point. That inside of this massively complex system of everybody in the world trying to deliver as much ad spend as possible into a limited amount of feed, that there's gonna be some moment where it's gonna be volatile or some moment where it's not gonna work the way you want.

It's like owning Bitcoin and being like, why is there a 40% drawback? Like, it's like you chose volatility. You, you adopted into a game that way. And so for us it's like, oh, delivery stalled On these campaigns. We have these backup, highest volume, ready to go, accelerated delivery for the next hour. Whatever action you needed to take.

When it's those peak moments, when it's Cyber Mondays, Monday night in that last window, there's no going, oh, it's not delivering. What do I do? Find some new way to get the delivery in ready go, and just being prepared to act that way. That the expectation is chaos. The expectation is volatility, not, oh my gosh, I can't believe meta's not delivering.

I think is another way to just sort of approach these with like, Hey, we assume it's not gonna work. We assume there's gonna be a problem. Where do we go when the inevitable challenge occurs?

[00:15:15] Richard Gaffin: Yeah. Well, it's interesting. Every other moment of the year, what we tend to say is that like, Hey, media buying tactics are not really gonna get you any sort of marginal, incremental gain, right? It's all about creative, it's all about the offer, blah, blah, blah. That's obviously still the case on Black Friday, cyber Monday.

However, what's added on top of that is that media buying tactics and small changes and being sort of clever about how you're constructing things actually can have an enormous impact, right?

[00:15:38] Taylor Holiday: well, I think there's a huge unresolved question in our industry about the merits of spend on this weekend.

[00:15:44] Richard Gaffin: Hmm.

[00:15:44] Taylor Holiday: So I've been trying to gather as much data as I can because Anmar, who sits now two desks next to me here in the office, who works with some of our bigger customers, and I have been having this, like, we're trying to be thoughtful to build the best available truth we have about the incremental impact of ad spend and key moments like this in particular Black Friday, cyber Monday.

And we're continuing to hone in. We have a bunch of CLS studies happening. We're trying to gather some from other third party partners. We're trying to. Really just put this just under scrutiny because I do think that brands are committing millions of dollars to spend and it's just unclear exactly what would happen if they substantially increased it or decreased it in any given moment in an hour.

Like what's the flow of revenue realization between spend in the morning versus evening? Like one of the things you see happen a lot is like, on cyber Monday morning as an example, you'll hear a lot of people start talking about overspending. Or Saturday morning you'd hear this and it's just unclear to me that.

A bunch of spend in an hour without revenue realization is actually an indication that that's bad. And how to handle that and interact in these really, really tight windows. Like people, people understand, I think generally like the, the lag effects of media over a one day, seven day, 28 day effect. But like, what's the difference between 10:00 AM and 3:00 PM on Black Friday?

I think that's less clear in terms of the realization of value in curves in that way. So I think that there's, this is actually the highest leverage media buying moment of the whole year. Like I saw there's a media buyer on Twitter that I think a lot of people follow that was like, this is the easiest day of the year, and I just think it's so functionally wrong is that this is actually the most complex, highest volatile environment where media buyers could either waste or make you millions of dollars with good decision making.

[00:17:19] Richard Gaffin: Yeah, I mean, I know we had a, we had a instance, I think this was on Saturday, right? Where there was like a weird spike in spend in the morning and one of our buyers basically like it ha, it overspent in the morning, and then this was Sunday I think, and then by the end of the day, by midnight, she had essentially fixed it by working all day and taking.

Basically like a laundry list, essay length, number of actions to get spent exactly where it needed to be. So it's like, in other words, not the easiest day by any means. Yeah. Very complex.

[00:17:47] Taylor Holiday: have huge budgets and so like if you do encounter any of these errors, like O over delivery or under delivery, you end up off course a lot, right? And so I think that that like that then what you need to do to bring back that into correct position. Is really challenging. And so, it does, it, it requires discipline and maintenance and attention and presence and, you know, there I posted a picture of our team.

We had a lot of people out in Dubai.

[00:18:10] Richard Gaffin: Yeah.

[00:18:11] Taylor Holiday: And Dubai is 12 hours ahead, right? So you can imagine like Cyber Monday, really, the, the, the, the action starts at noon PST, that's midnight in Dubai. And so they were up all night and there was this picture of them sort of all just like collapsed on the couch the next day with.

A bunch of pizza boxes laid out, and it was like, that's the reality of being a media buyer on these days. It's high leverage. It matters. Your clients expect attention to detail. They want constant communication. They want to know you're there and your job is to sort of ride the reins of the spend and make sure that it makes it home safely.

[00:18:42] Richard Gaffin: Yeah. Okay. Let's let's get back to the numbers here, I guess. Yeah. Any, anything else that was particularly kind of stood out or was sort of an outlier here or anything about 2025 that felt subsequently different from previous years?

[00:18:58] Taylor Holiday: Yeah, I think to me, cyber Monday was the one that I was like, and I, I'm gonna have to dive in a little bit more where generally speaking it is, as good, if not better than Black Friday in many cases. But looking like returning customer revenue was minus one to target, it seemed like we had exhausted that a little bit.

Total spend was softer, five minus 5% to target. Meta in particular was behind, so it just looked like there was places where. Monday just didn't have the yield that it had in previous. I think overall we were like right on target, so point plus 0.07 at Target on Monday, but every other day was a beat to expectation.

So a little bit of the distribution, I think was was different than maybe we had, had initially thought. So that was, that was something where it team seemed to be like, what is it? I wonder what, let me look at Saturday compared to money day real fast. So Saturday total rev. There Monday? Yeah, Monday was still bigger, but not quite.

Usually it's almost twice as large. It was, looks like, it was like closer to 60% bigger this year. So maybe a little bit more. Distribution across the weekend was just interesting as, as a primary notice for me.

[00:20:09] Richard Gaffin: Yeah. All right, well, anything, anything else you wanna hit on this? 

[00:20:13] Taylor Holiday: So if we, if we take this sentiment that growth is a byproduct of a OV and inflation and pricing increase, substantial increase in buy now, pay later, I do think we continue to have this weird. And this is like a, a cultural behavioral norm that goes all the way into the, however you view the federal government spending, which is that we, the, the consumer clearly appears to be committed to spending

[00:20:38] Richard Gaffin: Yeah.

[00:20:39] Taylor Holiday: absent and beyond the actual, underlying health of their financial reality.

And I just, I do wonder as we sit in this sort of like a weird. Semi frothy state still with all the AI expectations, et cetera, et cetera. The tariff thing, still being unclear to me how this comes to roost it. I know I can be dispositionally a little bit of a doomers, and that's not a cool thing to be. But something feels off a little bit about the amount of spending given the surrounding environment. And the, the buy now pay later thing is just, I just don't like that. I don't like it as a, as a, as a mechanism in our lives. Every time I use it, I feel like I'm punishing my future self. That's what it feels like to me every time I click it and I, I don't click it very often.

Richard, for the, for the record.

[00:21:29] Richard Gaffin: Of course, of course. No, it's it's definitely, it seems like a sort of a very specific example of this sort of broader trend that we've been seeing of, of, I mean, gen generally, like credit card debt going up. This has been happening since, like last year around this time. Just generally speaking, people behaving as if they're in better economic circumstances than they actually are.

[00:21:50] Taylor Holiday: that's right. And that, that feels like something about us dispositionally as a. People in the United States that is this like set, it's almost entitlement to a lifestyle that might be beyond the means that we presently have. And there's just something there that I think is, is concerning to me.

And I, I listened to these conversations again, I'm going back to this stupid just 'cause I was, I had to drop my kids off to football practice. And so I went to the driving range last night and I just listened to random podcasts while I'm there and I was listening to these people and there's just like, it's like a delusion that like.

Oh, it's fine. We'll just keep accruing this debt and keep buying things. And we have to have these, this specific betting. And of course we have to go to Disneyland and of course we have to. And so what it feels like is, and look, the advertising industry is a big mechanism for propping up this desire and need.

So don't get me wrong, I think it's really powerful, but I just, it feels like there's a layer brewing that doesn't feel sustainable in this in this consumer economy.

[00:22:46] Richard Gaffin: Interesting. All right. Well, so I mean, I think that's maybe a good overall recap of what happened is like we did pretty well. It was a pretty good Black Friday, but there are some. Some signs that should cause us to worry a little bit over the upcoming year or just drive, kind of drive home to the point that like the fundamentals are still what matter and making short-term decisions that play into a long-term outcome and all those sorts of things that we've been harping on are more important than ever.

[00:23:13] Taylor Holiday: Another fun fact, I heard 900% increase in traffic from LLMs year over year. So that continued shopping trend of just engagement via ch I know. Did you do much shopping through Chap GBT? Do you use it at all?

[00:23:27] Richard Gaffin: Not really. But I will say like just anecdotally, I'll get a lot of people coming to us, like say for our admission program that found us on chat, GPT. So it is that, that's really kicked up in the last probably like six months I would say.

[00:23:39] Taylor Holiday: Yeah, for sure. I, I, I just think that there, I, no, I do, and I was having this debate with Sharid online. I, I use it for everything, like I, everything for shopping. So I find the experience to be, to be pretty good. So that's another thing to

[00:23:53] Richard Gaffin: Yeah.

[00:23:54] Taylor Holiday: to keep it at it.

[00:23:55] Richard Gaffin: Something to keep in mind. All right, cool. All right, well I think I think we can wrap it there unless there's something else you wanna hit. Yeah, for everybody, I'll, everybody else out there. Happy BFCM. I hope it was good for everyone. And obviously like, hey. 2026 is around the corner. My God, it seems like too many.

But here we are. 2026 is around the corner. It's time to be forecasting. If you're not already come check us out. Comment thread co.com, hit the higher us button. Let us know that you're interested in making a plan for 2026 that is going to account for long-term outcomes. And we would love to work with you.

Alright I think that's gonna do it for us. Take care folks and we'll see you next time. Bye