Black Friday 2026 predictions for UK retailers

AI assistants will send more Black Friday shoppers than last year

Expect more of your Black Friday traffic to start in AI assistants such as ChatGPT and Gemini this year, and expect each of those visits to be worth more than it was.

Adobe's 2025 holiday data showed traffic to US retail sites from generative AI tools up 693% across November and December. Our UK data points the same way.

For one retailer we work with, users arriving from ChatGPT grew around sixfold between November 2024 and November 2025. Revenue from those users grew roughly twentyfold, so each one was worth more than three times as much.

Across a sample of 13 retailers on Venditan Commerce, one recorded revenue from ChatGPT in November 2024. By November 2025, seven did.

The channel is still small. ChatGPT brought around a quarter of one per cent of that retailer's users last November, rising to just under 1% by September 2026. It will be bigger again this peak.

Assistants recommend the products they can read clearly. Complete, structured product data, with prices and stock that stay accurate once your offers go live, decides whether yours are the ones they pick. If that data lives in spreadsheets and supplier feeds, a product information management system is the place to start.

You'll also want to see the effect. A Google Analytics report of traffic and revenue by source/medium separates referrals from chatgpt.com and gemini.google.com from everything else, so you can take a baseline now and compare it after peak.

Deeper discounts will buy less growth than they did in 2025

If you plan to match or beat last year's discount depth, expect it to deliver less. Talon.One's global data had the average Black Friday discount rising to 25% from 21% in 2025, with little growth to show for it.

The retailers who grow this year will be the ones whose offers ask for something in return, usually a bigger basket. Talon.One saw that shift starting last year, with free shipping, bundles, minimum order thresholds and tiered rewards added to plain price cuts.

Expect more spend thresholds, multi-buys, gifts with purchase and member-only pricing in 2026, often several on the same basket. That brings its own risk. When a voucher, a threshold and a member price can all apply at once, the rules for which one wins need to be right before the traffic arrives.

Our offers and promotions tools cover product and order offers, free gifts and priority rules for stacked offers, and the loyalty system handles member rewards.

Shoppers and regulators will trust Black Friday prices less

Expect more of your customers to question whether a Black Friday price is really a saving. In YouGov's 2025 research, 35% of UK shoppers said they were less interested in mega-sale events than two or three years earlier, with misleading discounts the most common reason.

Regulators are heading the same way. The government plans to consult this autumn on banning fake "was" prices, invented discounts and misleading RRPs outright under the Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act 2024. That would remove the need to prove, case by case, that a price misleads.

The rules aren't settled yet. In July, the High Court rejected the CMA's proposed test for reference pricing in its case against Emma, and the CMA has temporarily withdrawn its discount pricing guidance. Until a clear benchmark returns, make sure every "was" price you show is one you genuinely sold at.

It's another reason to favour the offer types above. A spend threshold or a member price doesn't rest on a "was" price, and a sceptical shopper finds it easier to believe.

Mobile checkout will face more scrutiny this peak

Adobe's UK figures put mobile at 61.5% of online holiday spend in 2025, worth £16.5bn, so most of your Black Friday revenue will be taken on a phone. Two things around that checkout deserve fresh attention this year.

BNPL is the new factor. Since 15 July 2026, BNPL lenders have been regulated by the FCA, with affordability checks and upfront information for borrowers. The obligations sit with the lender, but the journey runs through your checkout, so don't assume it behaves as it did last peak.

Scripts are the risk that's easy to overlook. Peak usually brings new tags onto checkout, such as campaign pixels and review widgets, and each one is code running where card details are entered. If one is compromised, an attack such as Magecart can skim card details unnoticed, at the point in the year when there are the most to take. Checkout Audit watches your checkout for script changes and signs of tampering, and gives you the script inventory PCI DSS v4.0.1 requires.

Desktop testing won't catch the problems shoppers actually hit. Wallet payments, 3D Secure challenges and BNPL journeys behave differently on phones, and differently again inside Instagram and TikTok's in-app browsers, where social traffic lands.

The pages before checkout count too. When we reworked Nest's product listing and product pages, checkout abandonment fell by 69.3%. Our payments integrations page lists the providers that plug straight into Venditan Commerce.

Cyber Monday will carry more weight in 2026

Black Friday falls on 27 November 2026, with Cyber Monday on 30 November. We expect Monday to take a bigger share of the weekend's trade than it did in 2024 or 2025.

The reason is payday. In both of the last two years, Black Friday was also the last working day of November, when many monthly-paid customers get their wages. This year that payday lands on Cyber Monday, after most of the headline offers have run.

That makes Monday worth more of your firepower than usual. Holding a strong offer back for it, and keeping your best sellers in stock until Monday evening, puts you in front of customers when they've just been paid.

The Budget has moved too. The 2026 Autumn Budget is on 28 October, compared with 26 November last year, two days before Black Friday. In October 2025, retail sales volumes fell 1.1% as shoppers held off ahead of both, so this year's uncertainty should clear a month before peak.

The new dates also change how you should read your results:

• Compare by event day. Set Black Friday 2026 against 28 November 2025, not the same date last year.
• Expect November to look inflated. Cyber Monday 2025 counted towards December, while this year's falls in November.
• Ignore 2020. It's the last year Cyber Monday fell on 30 November, and lockdown makes it useless as a benchmark.