Jimmy Kim and a co-speaker break down BFCM data showing Black Friday still captured $6.2B in sales despite early promotions. They argue waitlists beat early sales: their M-Books launch saw a 700-person waitlist generate outsized revenue compared to general traffic, proving hype-driven lists drive bigger BFCM results than spreading discounts early.
Most of the sales still occurred on Black Friday. A lot of brands are reporting that on Cyber Monday, which was historically like the internet day or the day people bought, was actually a bigger day for them than even Black Friday. And if you look at Shopify's report, I mean, they did $6.2 billion of global sales on Black Friday. And this is just Shopify. I think it was about $11.5 billion total of GMV over the entire market. And over the total time of Friday through Monday, Shopify reported $14.6 billion. billion in revenue. The fact that people are waiting, even though every brand started sales earlier, it doesn't seem like it actually stole any sales forward. And the people who intended to purchase— That's interesting.
I guess like I'm wondering and thinking like, A, does it make sense to start marketing the sale earlier? Maybe the right move in hindsight is maybe that's when you build the waitlist, right? Maybe that's when you hype things, get people excited talking about what's to come, and that's when you build the waitlist. Like we just did a waitlist for our M-Books launch not too long ago. When you look at the data of like that small the list, let's call it 700 people versus the public, it's always crazy how much engagement and revenue comes from a waitlist.
