Top Actions, Week 47: Five Moves Before Black Friday
Holiday sales are forecast to pass $1 trillion for the first time, but more than half of the growth is inflation, and the biggest shopping days are under two weeks away. For most teams this is the last full week to change prices, promotions and product feeds before Thanksgiving. Below are the five actions we would rank highest this week by margin at stake, with the signal behind each one and what to check in your own data.
1. Plan Thanksgiving-to-Cyber-Monday promotions SKU by SKU, not by category
Promotions
The signal: Adobe expects Cyber Week to bring in $47.5 billion online, 17.3% of the season, with Cyber Monday the biggest single day at $15.1 billion. NRF says a growing share of shoppers plan to wait until Thanksgiving weekend to do most of their holiday shopping.
Why now: When demand piles into five days, every point of unneeded discount is multiplied. Category-wide offers give away margin on items that would have sold at full price anyway.
What to check: For each SKU in a Cyber Week offer, how it sold at full price in the two weeks before Thanksgiving last year. Items that sold through without help are candidates to pull from the deepest offers.
2. Separate price growth from unit growth before you judge the season
Demand
The signal: Bain forecasts 4.5% nominal growth and says inflation will account for more than half of it. NRF's forecast of $1.013 trillion, up 4.2%, is also nominal.
Why now: A season that grows in dollars can be flat or down in units. Teams that read dollar comps as demand will over-order for spring and react late to lines that are slowing.
What to check: Units against dollars by category for October and the first half of November. Categories with dollar growth but falling units are where shoppers are already pushing back on price.
3. Make your top gift SKUs readable by AI shopping agents
AI shopping
The signal: Adobe expects AI traffic to US retail sites to rise 130% this season, and 159% on Thanksgiving. Bain finds 24% of online shoppers expect to start holiday shopping on a general-purpose AI platform, up from 17% last year, and another 13% plan to use a retailer's own AI agent. Google's holiday guidance to merchants: success relies on an accurate product feed.
Why now: An agent can only recommend what it can read. Missing attributes, stale prices and wrong stock flags drop products from AI answers just as that traffic peaks.
What to check: For your top 200 gift SKUs, whether feed price and availability match the site, and whether the attributes shoppers ask about (size, material, compatibility, what's in the box) are filled in.
4. Use this week's retail sales report and earnings as a pre-Thanksgiving checkpoint
Market read
The signal: The Census Bureau releases October advance retail sales on Tuesday, November 17, at 8:30 a.m. ET. Home Depot (Tuesday), Target (Wednesday) and Walmart (Thursday) report third-quarter results this week.
Why now: It is the last outside read on consumer demand before the peak. What these retailers say about inventory and promotions tells you how hard the market is likely to discount.
What to check: Book a review for Thursday afternoon. Compare your October comps with the Census figure and with what was said on the calls about inventory and promotions, then confirm or adjust markdown depth for Week 48.
Source: Census Bureau release schedule
5. Decide your post-Cyber-Monday prices now
Markdowns
The signal: Walmart's holiday events run in three waves: early deals November 12–15, Black Friday deals November 23–29 and Cyber Monday offers November 30–December 2. NRF counts the holiday season through December 31.
Why now: Promotions now span most of November, and what happens after Cyber Monday is usually decided late and under pressure. Deciding now keeps promotional prices from lingering on items that don't need them, and flags slow sellers early enough to clear them before year end.
What to check: For each promoted SKU, the planned price on December 3 (back to full, hold, or step down) and the projected weeks of supply at December 31. Lines likely to carry well into January are early-December markdown candidates, not post-Christmas ones.
This list is editorial: five actions our team ranked from public signals. Profitmind's AI agents build this kind of list for your business from your own data: the best action for every SKU, every week, ranked by value. Positive ROI for every client, within 4–8 weeks of go-live.
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Top Actions, Week 47: Five Moves Before Black Friday
Five ranked actions for retail leaders before Black Friday: SKU-level promotions, real demand, agent-ready feeds, an earnings checkpoint and a December exit plan.
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