The short version
Black Friday is November 27 and Cyber Monday is November 30. Most BFCM inventory checklists tell you to "plan early". This one gives you the dates, the math, and the decisions you can still make today.
- Your real deadline is not November 27. It is the day stock has to be on the shelf at your warehouse, around November 16. Everything counts backward from there.
- Fix last year's numbers before you use them. If you stocked out last BFCM, your sales history understates demand. Correct it first.
- Order to a range, not a single number. Buy deeper on evergreen bestsellers, where leftovers are just January stock. Buy tighter on seasonal items, where leftovers become markdowns.
- Freight mode is now an inventory decision. For most imports, ocean is closing or closed. Air and split shipments are how late orders still make it.
- Write your weekend rules before the weekend. Decide now what you do when a bestseller is running out on Saturday afternoon, so nobody improvises at 2am.
Count backward from the shelf, not from Black Friday
Stock that lands on November 26 is not BFCM stock. It needs to be received, counted and pickable before your sale starts, and most 3PLs stop taking inbound 7 to 10 days before Black Friday.
So set one anchor: sellable by Monday, November 16. Allow about 5 days for receiving at peak, which means at the warehouse door by November 11. Every other date falls out of that. Those dates are the example this guide runs on. Ask your warehouse or 3PL for its own last receiving day and count back from that.
| How it ships | Typical door to door | Goods must leave the factory by | Status in early October |
|---|---|---|---|
| Ocean, Asia to US East Coast or Northern Europe | 40 to 50 days | September 22 to October 2 | Closed unless already on the water |
| Ocean, Asia to US West Coast | 25 to 35 days | October 7 to October 17 | Only if the goods are finished now |
| Air freight | 7 to 10 days | November 1 to November 4 | Open |
| Express courier | 3 to 5 days | November 6 to November 8 | Open, for small volumes |
| Domestic or nearshore truck | 2 to 7 days | November 4 to November 9 | Open |
Now subtract production time to get your PO deadline. With a 30-day production run and air freight, the PO has to be confirmed by October 2 to 5. With a 15-day run, by October 17 to 20.
One detail most checklists skip: Chinese factories are closed for Golden Week from October 1 to 7. A PO you send this week starts production on October 8, not today. A 30-day run then finishes around November 7, flies, and is on your shelf around November 19 to 22. That still makes Black Friday. It does not make an early-access sale.
If your date has already passed for a SKU, stop planning to restock it. Plan to ration it instead. The weekend rules below cover how.
This week: build the number
Fix last year's numbers before you trust them
Last year's BFCM sales are your best input and your most misleading one. They record what you sold, not what customers wanted. Four corrections matter.
- Stockouts. If a SKU ran out on Sunday, its sales history says demand stopped on Sunday. It did not. Scale the sales up to cover the hours you were out.
- One-off spikes. A creator post or a press mention last November will not repeat on schedule. Take it out of the baseline.
- Promo depth. 30% off last year and 20% off this year are different events. Note the discount next to every number you reuse.
- Bundles. Count bundle sales as demand for the components, once. Counting the bundle and its parts doubles your buy.
For SKUs with no history, borrow the launch curve of your closest existing product and start at the low end of the range below.
Forecast a range, with one SKU worked through
A single BFCM number per SKU will be wrong. A range tells you how wrong you can afford to be. Here is the full calculation for one bestseller.
- Start with last year. The SKU sold 600 units over the four days from Black Friday to Cyber Monday.
- Correct the stockout. It ran out at midday on Sunday, so it was in stock for 2.5 of 4 days. 600 / 2.5 x 4 = 960 units as a starting estimate. That assumes the hours you missed sold at the same rate as the hours you had stock. If you have daily data, correct day by day, because Friday is heavier than Monday.
- Apply your growth. Compare the last 8 weeks to the same 8 weeks last year. This store is up 20%. 960 x 1.2 = 1,152 units.
- Adjust for the offer. Same discount as last year, so no change. A deeper discount or a bigger ad budget moves this up.
- Build the range.
| Scenario | Multiplier | BFCM weekend units | Use it for |
|---|---|---|---|
| Low | 0.8x | 922 | Seasonal, giftable or new SKUs |
| Base | 1.0x | 1,152 | Steady sellers |
| High | 1.3x | 1,498 | Evergreen bestsellers |
The reason to buy evergreen bestsellers at the high end is simple. If you overshoot, the extra units are January stock you would have bought anyway. If you overshoot on a holiday gift set, the extra units are a markdown.
That asymmetry matters more than forecast accuracy. Sort your catalog into "sells all year" and "sells now or never" before you set a single quantity.
By your PO cutoff: place the order
The order quantity is demand until your next delivery can land, plus a buffer, minus what you already have or have coming.
Order = Demand until next arrival + Safety stock − On hand − On order
The mistake is covering only the BFCM weekend. Your next delivery after this one will probably land in January, so this order has to carry you through December too. Same SKU, base scenario:
| Period | Days | Units per day | Units |
|---|---|---|---|
| October 1 to November 22 | 53 | 40 | 2,120 |
| November 23 to 26, lead-in | 4 | 80 | 320 |
| November 27 to 30, BFCM | 4 | 288 | 1,152 |
| December | 31 | 60 | 1,860 |
| Total demand | 5,452 |
Add 500 units of safety stock. Subtract 2,200 on hand and 1,500 already on order and due before November 16. Only count inbound stock that lands before the period it has to cover. The order is 2,252 units, or 2,300 rounded up to the carton size. At the high scenario it is 2,600.
When cash is the limit. Do not spread a short budget evenly. Rank SKUs by gross margin earned per dollar of stock, fund the evergreen bestsellers fully, then work down the list until the money runs out. A fully stocked top 20 beats a thinly stocked catalog.
Place the January order now too. Chinese New Year is February 6, 2027, and factories wind down from late January. If you wait for BFCM results before reordering, you are competing for the last production slots. Send a provisional PO in mid November and adjust quantities on December 1.
Before the goods leave the factory: plan the freight
I spent years in freight forwarding before starting Forstock, and Q4 always looked the same. Brands planned inventory carefully, then lost two weeks in transit they never planned for. Four habits prevent most of it.
Split the shipment. You rarely need the whole PO by November 16. Fly the units that cover BFCM and the two weeks after. Put the rest on a boat for December and January. In the example above, that is roughly 1,000 units by air and 1,300 by ocean.
Do the air math per unit, not per shipment. An air quote looks expensive as a total. Per unit it often is not. If flying adds $1.80 to a unit that earns $28 of gross margin, an empty shelf costs you fifteen times more than the freight does. Air stops making sense for heavy, bulky or low-margin products, and that is where you ration instead.
Get the cargo-ready date in writing, then check it weekly. Production slips are the most common cause of late Q4 stock, more than ports or customs. Ask for a photo of finished goods a week before the date.
Book before you need it. Air capacity out of Asia tightens every November and rates climb with it. Tell your forwarder your volume and week now, even if the PO is not final.
Two checks for US importers: confirm your duty rate on the current tariff schedule before you approve the PO, and make sure your customs broker has the paperwork before the goods fly. A shipment held for documents is slower than a boat.
By November 13: get ready for the weekend
Put the stock where the orders will come from
Having enough units in total does not help if they sit in the wrong place. Settle three things by the first week of November.
- Location split. Divide stock by where last year's BFCM orders shipped to, not by where it is cheapest to store. Finish transfers by November 13, because warehouses stop doing internal moves once outbound peaks.
- Channel split. If you sell wholesale, on marketplaces or in stores, decide how many units each channel may take. Ring-fence your online BFCM stock so a wholesale order on November 20 cannot empty it.
- Your 3PL's real cutoffs. Ask for three dates in writing: last inbound receiving day, last day for same-day dispatch, and what happens to orders above their daily cap. Then set your delivery promise on the site to match.
Write the weekend rules before the weekend
During BFCM you will not have time to think, so decide now. Check one number per bestseller every few hours: at the current hourly sales rate, will this SKU last until midnight on Cyber Monday?
| What you see | What you do |
|---|---|
| Stock will last past Monday with room to spare | Nothing. Keep the offer running |
| Stock runs out on Monday | Stop paid ads that point at this SKU. Leave it in the sale |
| Stock runs out before Monday | Remove it from the sitewide discount, or cut the discount depth. Move a substitute into the hero slot |
| Stock runs out today and a PO is confirmed inbound | Switch to preorder with the real ship date on the product page |
| Stock runs out today and nothing is inbound | Let it sell out. Turn on back-in-stock signup and point traffic to the substitute |
| A SKU is selling far below plan by Saturday | Add it to a bundle with a bestseller, or raise its placement. Do not wait for Monday |
Two rules sit above the table. Never sell a preorder without a confirmed date from your supplier. And keep a small buffer unsold at each location, so a miscount at the warehouse becomes a correction and not an oversold order.
From December 1: deal with what is left
On December 1, work out weeks of cover for every SKU at its normal, non-sale rate. That one number sorts your leftovers.
- Evergreen SKUs with too much cover. Hold the stock and reduce the January PO you placed provisionally. No discount needed.
- Seasonal or giftable SKUs with too much cover. Mark down before the last Christmas shipping date in mid December. After that, gift demand is gone and the discount has to do all the work.
- SKUs that sold out. Estimate the hours out of stock and the sales lost. This is next year's stockout correction, and it is much easier to record now than to reconstruct in October 2027.
Then write three things down while they are fresh: forecast against actual per SKU, quoted against actual lead time per supplier, and promised against actual dispatch time at your 3PL. Returns will peak in the first half of January, so put resellable units back into available stock before you place the next reorder.
The whole plan as one checklist
By October 9
By October 20
By November 4
By November 13
November 16
November 27 to 30
December 1 to 7
Where Forstock fits
Everything above can be done in a spreadsheet for a handful of SKUs. It gets slow and error-prone at 200 SKUs across three locations, which is the problem Forstock was built for.
Forstock is an inventory planning app for Shopify. For BFCM it does three of the jobs in this guide:
- The forecast. A demand plan per SKU, location and month that you can edit, so your BFCM number sits in the plan and not in a side sheet.
- The order math. A reorder table that shows how much to order and the date to order by, using your lead times, safety stock, minimum order quantities and stock already in transit.
- The purchase order. POs created straight from those recommendations, with incoming stock counted against future need so you do not buy the same units twice.
Install Forstock from the Shopify App Store and build your BFCM plan before the next cutoff in the table above.
Questions brands ask in October
When is BFCM in 2026?
Black Friday is November 27 and Cyber Monday is November 30.
Is it too late to order stock for Black Friday?
For ocean freight from Asia, mostly yes. For air freight, no, if your supplier can finish production by about November 1. For domestic suppliers you have until early November.
What if I cannot afford the full order?
Fund the evergreen bestsellers fully and cut from the bottom of the list. Then ask your supplier to hold part of the run for a second, later payment. Most will agree before they will lose the order.
Is air freight worth it?
Compare the extra freight cost per unit with the gross margin per unit. For light, high-margin products it almost always is. For heavy or low-margin products it rarely is.
My supplier says the goods will be late. What now?
Ask what is finished today and fly that part. A partial shipment on the shelf by November 16 is worth more than the full order on November 30. Then ration the SKU with the weekend rules.
When should I reorder for January?
Before BFCM, not after. Send a provisional PO by mid November and adjust the quantities on December 1, because factories fill their last slots ahead of Chinese New Year on February 6, 2027.