In partnership with
34,465 founders and marketers are getting this newsletter today.
Welcome to the 1,360 new operators who joined us this week! 🤯
Hey Fastlane Insiders! 👋
BFCM just wrapped, and if you're thinking "time to catch my breath and coast into the holidays," I need you to pause right there…
Here's what the data is screaming: Shopify merchants processed $14.6 billion during BFCM, up 27% year over year, and US Cyber 5 sales hit a record $44.2 billion. Impressive, right? But here's the part most operators are missing: Roughly half of holiday spending still happens after Cyber Monday. That's not cleanup revenue. That's the actual season.
The brands that separate themselves in December aren't the ones with the biggest BFCM numbers. They're the ones treating December like Act 2, turning first-time buyers into fans, shifting from discount hunters to gift buyers, and building the retention foundation that makes Q1 2026 profitable instead of painful.
Your next move depends on how BFCM went. If you crushed it, protect margins and turn buyers into repeat customers. If you hit targets, shift your messaging from deal hunters to gift buyers. If you underperformed, audit calmly and win back browsers with focused plays—not panic discounts.
And whether you're launching your first collection or your 50th, AI just compressed product launch workflows from weeks to days, which means more testing, more shots on goal, and more learning before your next drop.
Here's what's inside this week's edition:
🎧 This Week's Podcast – Katie Keith from Barn2 breaks down the discounting mistake killing margins and why quantity-based incentives ("buy more, save more") outperform blanket site-wide sales for building sustainable profit
💡 Knowledge Drops – Your December gameplan for turning BFCM proof-of-concept into Q1 momentum, plus the AI workflow that compresses product launches from three weeks to three days
🔥 Tool of the Week – Trustoo Loyalty: points, VIP tiers, and referrals in one retention layer to turn BFCM buyers into December repeat purchasers
📡 Industry Pulse – Shopify's historic BFCM, AI's $67B influence on Cyber Week, Yotpo's sudden email/SMS shutdown, and what record shopper turnout means for your December strategy
If you're trying to figure out how to capture the remaining half of holiday spend, protect your margins, or launch faster—this edition's for you!
Let's dive in. 👇
🔥 Tool of the Week 🔥
Buy once, then disappear? Turn one-time shoppers into loyal repeat buyers — automatically with Trustoo Loyalty
Reward purchases, reviews, and shares with Points & Coupons — gamified incentives that drive engagement.
Launch VIP tiers and Referral programs to turn customers into brand advocates.
Fully customizable widget — 5-minute setup, no coding required.
Click to download Trustoo Loyalty on the Shopify App Store
→ Set points and discount ratio on Program
→ Style your widget on Brand Style
→ Launch in minutes
🎧 New Podcast Episode! 🎧
The Discounting Trap That's Quietly Bleeding Your Margins (And the "Buy More, Save More" Strategy That Actually Works)
Here's the brutal truth > Most brands just wrapped BFCM by running site-wide 20% off sales, watched orders spike for a few days, then sales completely dried up. The real damage? You've trained customers to wait for the next sale. Nobody's buying at full price anymore.
But what if there's an entirely different approach—one that protects margins and keeps revenue flowing through December and into Q1?
This week, I sat down with Katie Keith, Founder and CEO of Barn2, a company that's analyzed transaction data from over 100,000 stores and recently brought that expertise to Shopify. That bird's-eye view reveals which discount strategies actually drive profitability versus which ones just kill margins.
Here's what makes this conversation essential right now:
Quantity discounts flip the psychology — Instead of creating urgency around dates, quantity-based offers create permanent incentives to spend more anytime. You're not conditioning customers to wait for your next promotion—you're rewarding them for buying more today, tomorrow, or in February
Two fundamentally different approaches most brands confuse — Bulk tiered pricing ("buy 1-5 get 5% off, buy 6-10 get 15%") works for products people buy in large quantities, while volume bundles ("buy 2 for $15, buy 3 for $17") work better for nudging customers from one to three purchases. Choosing the wrong one leaves money on the table
Offset skyrocketing CAC with smarter discounting — With Google algorithm changes and increased ad competition pushing customer acquisition costs higher, you need more value from each first order. Strategic quantity discounts can lift AOV by 30-40% while maintaining healthy margins
Shopify's 25-discount limit doesn't have to constrain you — Modern quantity discount apps combine unlimited discount rules into a single Shopify discount code, letting you run different strategies across your catalog without hitting platform limitations
Build a year-round strategy, not promotional tactics — BFCM created urgency that worked regardless of discount structure, but what happens now that the promotional calendar has quieted down? Quantity-based discounting gives you a sustainable framework that doesn't rely on artificial deadlines and keeps cash flowing through the slower months
The brands mastering these strategies aren't just recovering from Q4 chaos—they're building unstoppable momentum for 2025 while their competitors are stuck wondering when to run their next sale.
LISTEN NOW → Discover how to increase AOV without training customers to wait for sales
🔥 Power Up Your Store for the New Year: 50% Off + 50 Free Migrations 🔥
December is the perfect time to set your eCommerce business up for a strong 2026. Cloudways makes it easy with hosting built for speed, simplicity, and freedom.
Get 50% off for 3 months and enjoy 50 free migrations to move all your stores effortlessly, stress-free.
Experience up to 65% faster performance with our new NGINX stack, scale seamlessly across 5 top cloud providers, and let Cloudways Copilot handle server maintenance so you can focus on what matters — growing your business. No limits on traffic or number of stores.
💡 Knowledge Drop of the Week 💡
BFCM Was Just Proof of Demand. December Is Where You Make (or Miss) Your Year
Shopify merchants just processed $14.6 billion over BFCM with 27% year-over-year growth and 81+ million shoppers. Impressive, right? Here's the part almost everyone misses: roughly 50% of holiday spend still happens after Cyber Monday.
That's not cleanup revenue—that's the actual season.
Think about it: if a shopper planned to spend $800 on holiday purchases and used $350 during BFCM, that leaves $450 still waiting to be assigned. Multiply that across tens of thousands of people in your audience, and you'll see why treating December like "leftovers" is leaving serious money on the table.
The brands that stand out in December? They're not running deeper discounts, they're running smarter plays:
If you crushed BFCM — Your temptation is to coast or spray more discounts. Don't. Instead, tighten discount depth (a free gift often beats another 10% off), stress-test your shipping cutoffs before they break, and run "love it or we fix it" campaigns that turn returns into exchanges or upsells
If you hit targets — You left money on the table because BFCM traffic is full of coupon chasers. December buyers care about getting the right gift. Shift your messaging: curate by recipient ("Gifts for runners," "Under $50"), rewrite product pages for gifting outcomes, and test simple bundles that make the choice feel obvious
If you underperformed — December can still save your quarter if you don't panic. Run a fast audit: compare converters vs browsers to find drop-off points, fix the basics first (shipping costs, mobile speed), then run focused retargeting with honest shipping cutoffs instead of desperate discounts
The operational difference between brands that coast and brands that compound? Three things: turning shipping deadlines into conversion tools with clear "order by" dates, positioning gift cards as your late-buyer safety net, and treating customer service as your Q1 retention launchpad by tagging high-value interactions for follow-up.
One more thing: plan your January campaigns now while BFCM data is still fresh. Segment buyers into cohorts (discount-driven, high-AOV gift buyers, repeat purchasers) and map sequences that focus on education and habits—not just more coupons.
The AI Workflow That Compresses Product Launches From Three Weeks to Three Days
Launching a new collection should feel like a win. Instead, for most Shopify teams, it's a late-night scramble with raw supplier photos sitting in a shared drive, product details trapped in a spreadsheet, and a growing list of tasks scattered across Slack, email, and sticky notes.
Here's what's wild: the brands that scale collections fast aren't working harder—they've built a connected, AI-powered launch workflow that turns raw assets into launch-ready content in a single pass.
The shift isn't about tools. It's about treating AI like your production assistant, not a side experiment. Tools like MerchantFloor can tie images, copy, and content together, letting you ship higher-quality launches in a fraction of the time—if you know how to structure the workflow.
Here's the AI-first sequence that's changing the game:
Turn raw photos into studio-quality images in bulk — Use AI to remove backgrounds, fix lighting, add shadows, standardize aspect ratios, and sharpen soft images. In one session, go from inconsistent supplier photos to a full library of studio-like product images ready for PDPs, ads, and marketplaces
Create AI lifestyle images so every SKU tells a story — Take a single clean product shot and drop it into multiple scene presets to generate realistic on-model, flatlay, or in-home compositions. No studio needed—just one good product image and a clear brand vibe
Let AI draft SEO product descriptions that actually sell — Feed in product specs, materials, and positioning to produce scannable summaries, benefit-led bullet points, and longer SEO-friendly descriptions. AI handles 70-80% of the work, then you edit for brand voice and accuracy
Batch launch-ready social posts and emails with AI — Outline your key messages (teaser, launch day, social proof, behind the scenes, last call), gather your product descriptions and top images, feed everything into your AI copy tool for channel-specific output, then edit for clarity and schedule
When you compress launch time from three weeks to three days, you don't just save time—you get more shots on goal. More creative tests. More offers tried. More feedback loops before your next season.
The real shift here is mindset. AI isn't here to replace your creative team. It's here to remove the repetitive parts so you can focus on strategy, story, and testing. The brands treating AI like a one-off experiment are the same ones still scrambling at midnight before launch day.
READ THE FULL AI LAUNCH WORKFLOW → Get the step-by-step checklist for turning raw assets into launch-ready content
📡 Industry Pulse 📡
Every week, I come across strategies and insights that are just too good not to share. Here's what caught my attention this week.
Shopify's Record-Breaking BFCM: Shopify merchants generated $14.6 billion in GMV over BFCM, up 27% year over year, with Shop Pay sales jumping 39%. The real signal? Consumers are concentrating spend with trusted brands that offer streamlined checkout experiences. Payment UX and trust signals just became table stakes.
Cyber 5 Becomes AI- and BNPL-Driven: U.S. online sales hit an all-time high of $44.2 billion during Cyber 5, but here's the twist: Salesforce data shows AI agents influenced roughly 20% of global Cyber Week orders, driving $67 billion in sales. Brands using branded AI saw 32% faster growth. Agentic commerce just moved from experiment to core revenue driver.
Holiday Turnout Hits 202.9 Million Shoppers: The NRF tallied a record 202.9 million U.S. consumers shopping from Thanksgiving through Cyber Monday—well above forecasts. Even with mixed macro signals, shoppers are still prioritizing holiday spend. The brands winning the rest of Q4? Those combining sharp promotions with frictionless omnichannel experiences.
Yotpo Email/SMS Sunset Creates a Retention Scramble: Yotpo is sunsetting its native email and SMS products in December 2025, pushing brands toward Attentive or Omnisend. Klaviyo is countering with a 12-month price match and unified CRM stack. If your lifecycle programs sit on Yotpo, you have weeks—not months—to rebuild core flows and migrate consented profiles before you start bleeding revenue.
Until Next Thursday
Here's what I find interesting as I review the data from this past week:
The brands winning December—and setting up 2026 right—aren't the ones celebrating BFCM victories and coasting into the holidays. They're treating December like Act 2, capturing the half of holiday spend still in play, and building the retention foundation that makes Q1 profitable instead of painful.
Whether you crushed BFCM and need to protect margins, hit targets, and shift to gift buyers, or underperformed and need to audit without panic, there's a clear playbook for each scenario. And if you're launching collections, AI just gave you the ability to compress your workflows from 3 weeks to 3 days. More testing velocity. More shots on goal. More learning before your next drop.
We're 4 weeks from year-end…
Still plenty of time to make moves—not just for December revenue, but for building the systems and customer relationships that compound into Q1.
If you're in the middle of testing any of this, or you hit a wall trying, just hit reply. I read every email, and your questions and wins shape what I unpack in future editions.
Cheers,
— Steve
P.S. Missed a previous edition? Check out the archive for more growth strategies and insights.
