How Big Is Black Friday for UK Shoppers This Year?
Black Friday is still a genuinely large moment in the UK retail calendar, even as its edges soften. Barclays research found that shoppers were expected to spend an average of £430 each over the Black Friday period, £91 more than the year before, taking total spending past £10.2 billion across the UK. Nationwide's own payments data backs up the scale of it on the day itself. Black Friday on 28 November 2025 produced a record 11.9 million transactions, 8.7% higher than the 10.9 million transactions recorded on Black Friday the year before. That is a lot of people deciding to spend money on one Friday.
But the picture is not uniformly rising everywhere you look. The Office for National Statistics recorded seasonally adjusted retail sales volumes falling by 0.1% over the month, suggesting the Black Friday effect on the wider economy was slightly weaker than usual this year. Online retail told a steadier story. Online sales rose 0.7% month on month and were 8.3% higher than November the year before, which matters if your business sells through a website or a marketplace rather than a physical till. Finder's consumer research puts a number on individual intent too, finding that the average person planned to spend £124 across Black Friday and Cyber Monday 2025. Read together, these figures describe a shopper who is still showing up, still spending, and a little more selective about where.
Why Chasing the Deepest Discount Costs You More Than It Wins
The instinct every November is to go deeper than last year's discount, on the theory that the steepest price wins the sale. This is where most small businesses lose money they never needed to lose. The research on how brands grow points in a different direction entirely. The Ehrenberg-Bass method's law of growth holds that brands grow by gaining more buyers, known as penetration, not by pushing existing loyal customers into buying more. Growth comes from reaching new people who were not already shopping with you, not from squeezing a bit more spend out of the ones who were coming anyway.
Heavy discounting does the opposite of what most owners think it does. A customer who was already going to buy from you in December now buys in November at a lower price, and you have given away margin on a sale you would have had regardless. Worse, every year you run a steeper discount than the last, you teach your most loyal customers that your full price is not your real price, and they learn to wait for the sale rather than buy when they need what you sell. A discount that only pulls forward existing demand is not growth. It is a loan against your own margin, repaid with interest in customer expectations the following year.
The alternative is to point your Black Friday effort at reaching people who do not already know you, through wider advertising reach, a referral push, or a presence in places your current customers already spend time, and to treat the discount itself as one part of a reason to buy rather than the whole of it. A smaller, well-reasoned offer paired with genuine visibility among new buyers tends to build the business in a way that the steepest possible markdown never does.
What UK Pricing Law Says About "Was" and "Now" Prices
Before you set any Black Friday price, it helps to know what the rules say, because a surprising number of common Black Friday habits sit on the wrong side of consumer law. Reference pricing is the technical term for comparing your current price to another price, whether that is the RRP, a competitor's price, or your own previous price shown as a "was" figure against a "now" figure, and UK guidance is explicit that this kind of comparison carries legal weight, not a marketing flourish.
The practice that gets small retailers into trouble most often is the serial discount, where each new markdown does not offer a bigger saving than the last. Guidance from the Chartered Trading Standards Institute's Business Companion service gives a concrete example of exactly this problem: a coat offered at "was £150 now £99," then marked down again and advertised as "was £150, was £99, now half price £75". On paper that looks like an escalating bargain. In practice the first reduction already told the full story, and restating an old "was" price alongside a new one can mislead a shopper about how much they are saving. If your Black Friday plan involves a string of "was" prices stacked on top of each other, this is the exact pattern to check against before you publish anything.
The fix is straightforward. Keep your reference prices honest, make sure any "was" price reflects a price you genuinely charged for a reasonable period, and resist the temptation to layer discount on top of discount purely for dramatic effect. A single, clear, truthful saving does more for trust than a confusing stack of claims, and it keeps you well clear of a pricing complaint arriving in your inbox the week after Black Friday.
How to Price Your Black Friday Offer Without Racing to the Bottom
Pricing a Black Friday offer well is less about finding the lowest number you can survive and more about finding the number that signals genuine value without cheapening what you sell every other week of the year. This is where the psychology of how people read a price matters as much as the arithmetic behind it. Our guide to psychological pricing goes deeper on the mechanics, but a few principles carry directly into Black Friday planning.
Frame the offer around a clear, single reduction rather than a maze of overlapping deals, since a shopper comparing five "up to" percentages across your site cannot tell which one applies to the thing they want. Bundle rather than blanket-discount where you can, because adding a genuine extra to the purchase often reads as more generous than shaving a further few pounds off the headline price, and it protects your margin on the core product. And hold a line on your very best-selling lines. Discounting the product that already sells itself gives away margin for no extra demand, while a meaningful reduction on something slower-moving can shift stock that was going to sit there regardless. None of this needs the deepest discount in your market. It needs the clearest one, priced, properly explained.
How to Prepare a Black Friday Plan That Does Not Rely on Panic
The businesses that avoid the race to the bottom are, almost without exception, the ones that started planning months before the day itself rather than scrambling the week before. Waiting until November to decide what you are discounting, who you are telling, and how you will fulfil a sudden spike in orders is how a business ends up matching a competitor's price out of fear rather than judgement. Our full walkthrough on how to prepare for Black Friday covers the operational groundwork in detail, from stock and fulfilment to the content you need ready before the traffic arrives.
The short version is that preparation buys you the calm to price well rather than desperately. Decide your offer and your reasoning for it early enough that you are not reacting to what everyone else is doing in the final fortnight. Warm up your audience before the day with genuine previews rather than a surprise blast, since a customer who has been told what is coming is far more likely to act the moment it lands than one meeting the offer cold in a crowded inbox. And build in the capacity, whether that is stock, staff hours, or a website that can handle a surge, to deliver on the promise you make, because a Black Friday sale that ends in late deliveries or out-of-stock messages does more damage to trust than no sale at all.
What a Black Friday Campaign Built on Value Looks Like in Practice
To make this concrete, picture an illustrative small homeware shop called Thistle & Pine, a two-person business selling handmade ceramics online and from a small shopfront. Rather than matching the 50% off banners filling every larger retailer's site, Thistle & Pine offered a genuine, single discount on its best-loved mug range, priced against what it had charged for months beforehand, and paired it with a free hand-written care card for every order placed that weekend. The offer was simple enough to explain in one sentence, which meant it travelled well in a short social post and an email that did not need three paragraphs of small print to be understood.
In the weeks before, Thistle & Pine told its existing customers the offer was coming and used a modest amount of advertising reach to introduce the shop to people who had never bought from it, rather than spending the whole budget re-selling to people already on the list. The result, as this hypothetical illustrates, is the shape every small business should be aiming for: a clear, honest saving that respects the rules on reference pricing, reaching some genuinely new customers alongside the loyal ones, without a single price slashed so far that it undercut the brand's own sense of what its work is worth.
How Do You Measure Whether Black Friday Worked?
The day after Black Friday is when most small businesses only look at one number: how much did we take. That answer is useful, but it is not the whole story, and treating it as the only measure is how a business ends up chasing a bigger discount every year regardless of whether the discount itself was the reason people bought. The ONS found that around 3 in 10 adults (31%) planned to shop in the Black Friday sales this year, with 19% intending to shop less than the year before and 10% intending to shop more, which is a reminder that a good chunk of the market was pulling back rather than piling in, so a flat result against last year is not automatically a failure.
Worth tracking alongside total revenue is how many of your Black Friday customers were genuinely new to your business, since that is the number that tells you whether the campaign grew your customer base or simply moved existing demand earlier in the calendar. Worth watching too is what happens in December and January, whether the new customers you won come back, and whether your regular, full-price customers kept buying at their usual rate or waited for the next markdown. A plan built with a clear strategy behind it, in the way our guide to what a marketing strategy is sets out, gives you the framework to judge the day against more than the one-off number on the till.
