#209 Black Friday Broke the Internet. Here’s How Our Brands Hit Record Days Anyway

Did Shopify crashing on Cyber Monday jack up your business while Amazon glitched out on your approved deals? Yes, they did. It was like a stock market tanking on payday. And if you're running your brand on one platform hoping nothing breaks during peak season, this week's your wake-up call. Welcome to episode 209 of the High Voltage Business Builders Week in Review. It's Friday. Week in Review is actually Saturday because I'm a little bit behind. It's December 6th, 2025, and I'm Neil. All right, guys, due to the holiday weekend of broken stores, thanks Shopify, uh, and other nonsense, this edition is being sent out on the weekend.

So it's the weekend edition. If you're new here, huddle in.

If you're a returning listener, welcome back to the only e-commerce breakdown that gives you exactly what matters in under 15 minutes. As always, like and comment on YouTube or leave us a review on Apple Podcasts. Jump on our social media too if you like to follow along, and the links in the show notes if you need those links, or go to voltage dm.com/podcasts. More importantly, make sure you share this episode with an entrepreneur looking to build their business to a 7-figure exit. So Shopify decided to take a nap during one of the busiest e-commerce days of the year, which I'm surprised by because they've done this so much. I think that they really didn't understand that there's thousands of additional, maybe millions of other people who decided to check out their platform because, you know, traffic is shifting around, right? And it would appear that for the first time, a lot of traffic was coming off of the GPT engines, the Perplexities of the world and that kind of stuff. And that was really a different move in the platform, which I think maybe they just caught off guard. They did confirm the outage. The stores were live. We couldn't access the panels, the settings, inventory adjustments, pricing. In other words, the biggest day of the year was suddenly just kind of covered in wet cement. Yeah. So we were just waiting to see what happened. And, you know, at the end, this isn't rare. There's major outages all the time. It's just usually it doesn't happen right in the middle of such cool events. Shoppers didn't care per se. They spent a lot of money on deals. Black Friday hit a projected $12 billion. Cyber Monday was estimated to cross $14 billion. Consumers are still spending, but if your store's down and they want to spend with you, you're done, right? That's trouble. So there's a risk of a single channel dependence is what I'm hinting at here. If your Shopify is your entire store, one outage could give you the knockout punch on such an important day. If you've only got Amazon, TikTok, or Walmart running, it's just a speed bump. If you've got multiple platforms up, that's really the difference between amateurs and operators, guys. We've talked about this before. Operators build redundancy. Operators keep moving when the systems break. It's very important that you guys really consider where 2026 is going to be for you. Other things that were going on, Shopify was not the only platform that was misbehaving. Amazon started to have glitches as well. So if Amazon was a punch to the jaw, Amazon's glitch was a kick to the shins while you were already on the ground, which is not fair, right? There was a major glitch inside of Amazon that suppressed Black Friday and Cyber Week deals. They were glitch scheduled and things that were promoted, the badges disappear. Search tank visibility disappeared, conversion rates nosedived, and Amazon didn't really tell anybody. At least Shopify admitted there was an outage. There were no warnings, alerts, not even a, hey, we're looking into this issue. Just gone on the biggest selling week of the year. Way to go, Amazon. If your entire holiday strategy was built on Lightning Deals, 7-day deals, aggressive coupon stacking, you probably felt this more than others. Missing a deal badge during the holidays is like showing up to a job interview without pants. Just not going to get picked. So as we're heading towards this Christmas week, make sure you log into Seller Central, check every badge you're running, look for archive badges in the search results and active badges. Make sure your events dashboard is set up. Don't see any suppressed, inactive, missing tags, you know, deals, this kind of stuff. Sometimes just adjusting the discount or resubmitting will force Amazon to refresh your badge. So check that out. Guys, always again, the real lesson is this was why you cannot be dependent on one platform. Shopify can crash, Amazon can glitch, TikTok can slow down or have problems. Walmart can shuffle your listings without warning. But if you're diversified and you build multiple audiences, you got redundancy in your pipelines. Don't panic. You have a pivot, right? Eternal Brands did that last week. The ones with Shopify running in backup offers, Amazon offers, we absorbed the different platform opportunities across those. I didn't really care if one badge disappeared in one place because we had enough channel absorption to evolve it across multiple platforms. Diversification, guys, just again isn't protection. It just isn't leverage. These platforms aren't always reliable, right? So operators, you need to be adapting to the changing in the market. There's obviously a shift that's going on. The real key here, guys, is to remember if you're going to become a real brand and you want to make real market share and stability through 2026, you're going to want to be omnichannel. We talked about it a lot in the years before, but this is really the most pivotal moment in the whole economy of e-commerce. This thing is changing. So dramatically. So let's talk about what you need to be doing to prepare through this December headed into the new year, what you should be doing this week and next week. It isn't just about building new systems. It should be maximizing already what works and protecting your profit margins for the 4th quarter. So timing is what I'm referring to. Yes, we need to talk about 2026, but let's talk about timing right now because tactical players are obviously working channels that are running right now. So if you have the opportunity. To increase inventory at this point, you need to do it before the, if you're on the Chinese holiday and that kind of stuff headed into January, you gotta be aware of that. So you wanna double down on your best sellers, maybe not your full catalog at this point. You know, money is in the winners, not necessarily in variety yet. Let's push, you know, some of that variety opportunity to January. Highest conversion rates on your SKUs, best reviews, lowest return rates, the fastest shipping. You know, don't be scaling losers and setting cash on fire in December. Really focus on those product opportunities that need that capitalization growth. Remember, you don't have to necessarily push so hard on PPC. There's an opportunity to test your PPC right now to find out if you can keep your moving and organic rank. It's really about maximizing profits so you can double down on inventory, right? Get aggressive with your targeting. Traffic is at an annual peak, but don't waste your money because Amazon wants to steal it this time of year. So does every other platform, right? That includes Meta. And TikTok and everywhere else, right? Retargeting is a good opportunity. Like for an Amazon, there's views remarketing. There's TikTok through view audiences. There's obviously Meta retargeting changing up now with Andromeda. So we'll be talking more about that as we go along. There's email and SMS follow-ups. You should definitely be doing that on the Shopify stores because your warm audience is usually 10 times more likely to buy from you in December than in January, right? Just keep that in mind. There's always a bit of a slump in January for a lot of products. Some of them will increase, of course, greatly in that first quarter. That's the health and wellness quarter as we refer to it. But guys, don't forget there is an urgency. Okay. Usually at this point about how we discount products to move volume, but be careful with that. You don't need to offer like 50% off. You don't need to necessarily just try to move more volume with more coupons. It doesn't necessarily work that way. Right. Things that are attempting to gain value through revenue is not the way that you keep your profit. We want to make sure people protect their margins is basically what I'm trying to say. December is the easiest month to accidentally break your business. What we're trying to suggest here is making sure that you maximize your profitability. So know your numbers, check your fees, monitor your returns. If you're scaling on ad spend, you know, verify your contribution margin daily to make sure you know where your, you know, TACOS is. Where your ACOS is. Don't just spend to spend. There are some opportunities to gain traction this time of year because people will fall out of inventory. I saw earlier that over 800 Chinese sellers have now moved from China to Hong Kong to try to avoid the coming issue with their taxation. We'll see if they stay online. There's a lot of those that are going to jump out. So as you're thinking about this whole movement, as you're realizing that the economy of e-commerce is shifting, prepare for that January. Punch. What usually happens is returns spike, traffic will drop, conversions can tank. You should be preparing your January offers right now. Get your inventory staged up, make sure you've got your ads, get your retargeting segments for both Amazon and everywhere else, Shopify, et cetera. December belongs to the bold. January belongs to the smart guys. I think a lot of money can be made in these coming months and a lot of money can be lost in January if you're not smart about what you do. Okay. So let's talk about what's happening inside Voltage right now, guys. I got some quick updates. Real world stuff always beats theory. Okay. This is things that we're operating under right now. Shopify was obviously wobbling. We had our Amazon and TikTok systems going. Our email was firing, even though we need to optimize that more, which we're in the process of doing. But those brands that were hitting some record days on Black Friday were insulated through omnichannels, which is something you need to consider as we talk about how we move forward. You know, TikTok was running UGC targeted ads on Amazon searches, literally about a 20% bump we saw. That's a thing now, right? It works ridiculously well.

It's super cool.

We've talked about the, you know, the halo effect that some of you have heard me say before. The halo effect is very important as we move forward. Obviously AI has some component of what we're doing, including image variations, the ability to move, you know, 10, 20 images very fast across the platforms because we can create them very quickly. Top winners, obviously we cut their acquisition costs down, which is great. On one of the brands by 38%, which is cool. Brands survived the deal glitches. Most of them were just part of the regular offer stack. And we had, you know, a multi-channel opportunity to kind of recover the load, especially when Amazon glitched. And thankfully we were making sales on Shopify, but even though we couldn't admin the back office, yay. But you know, the aspect of is, you know, all these things is I want you to really understand. That while platforms break, the operators should not. And that's you, right? So look for your diversification, look for your systems, look for your SOPs. If we are supporting you inside of Voltage, we are continually reminding you about maximizing profit and being very smart with your deals, treating you like CEOs who are operators, not just sellers. So you understand what your strategy should be going forward. Now, guys, if you're paying attention, you'll notice that when Shopify goes down, Amazon glitches, TikTok surges, and Walmart grows. This means things are happening in the AI systems. Google's changing it. It's not really chaos. It's basically what's becoming the new landscape of e-commerce going into 2026. And in this landscape, operators who win will be you guys that are listening to this and don't just hope that things go right. They are the ones that are building for the things they know can go wrong. That means you're gonna be on multiple channels. You will build an audience you will own ultimately. You'll build offers, not discounts. You will leverage AI tactically to move faster as a micro aspect of your activities with a macro goal of incorporating it where it makes sense. Don't just rely on AI to rely on AI for the fun of it or the growth hack or any of this other crap. Always protect your cash, your margin, and be aware of your cash flow and how it's impacted by the movement of your products. Okay? We want you to get to 4 turns a year. You need to be smart about how you do that. Your competitors are still waiting for things to go back to normal. Guys, I always hear this all the time. When's it gonna go back to normal? It's not. All right. You know the truth. Normal was gone. And this is the game now. Game is speed. It is advantage. It is diversification. It is gonna be your shield. Execution will be the sword by which you cut it down. Okay? If you wanna win in 2026, you need to start behaving like a multichannel operator. And this is something we've talked about for years. It's always about when. And now it is really the time, guys. It is really the time. And if you need help implementing any of these strategies, if you need a way to see your way Clear through some of this. If you need help with product ideas, if you need help with growth strategies and exit planning, you guys can always hit me up at 417-413-4209. Use this keyword episode 209. You're gonna hit me directly, or just email me neil@voltagedm.com with the same keyword. We'll talk about what we're doing in the high voltage business builders, what we'll be doing in Cayman Data with our intelligence toolset and product-based engine platform that's coming out. If you need support just finding a product idea to move to the next step, you can check out that GPT that we created, the product research GPT for you guys. It's $5. It's at gpt.caymandata.com. And as always, I always include an opportunity for people to talk to me personally with a no-pressure discovery chat. If you ever want to talk about these things and every week we're going over new things. And if you need support and help, my people always know that they can find me inside of our communities. If you're not in a community and not in a support, And all of these things become very concerning as to what to do and how to do it, just reach out, talk with me. We'll give you a strategy. It really is no pressure conversation. I'm always looking for great people to do good things with. Sometimes it doesn't make sense to do it at the right time or the right thing. But what I want you to understand here going forward is this is a year where you must pivot beyond a single channel. It just is the way it's going to happen. It's the way we're moving our brands. It's the way we're coaching our CEO operators. It is the way my bigger friends and brands are going to be moving. They've already done a lot of it in the last year, putting a lot of footwork down. It's the year of AEO engines. We're going to talk about that and the organic aspect of traffic moving forward, not just paid traffic, which I love, but the organic move of SEO content across multiple platforms now in the way that buyers are changing their psychology of buying. Such a big thing, guys. And we're going to touch on that more as we go forward. So guys, I really appreciate you always hanging out with me here on the podcast. If you liked it, comment and subscribe us on YouTube or one of the other channels, push it out on social media. And again, always share it with a friend who might be in this space who, you know, is, is, you know, battling and needs support, needs community, needs help, needs focus. We're here to help you guys really make sure that you get to a maximum business opportunity that might end in a life-changing or generational wealth opportunity to exit your company. So guys, this has been a weekend review, a weekend edition of the High Voltage Business Builders Podcast, which is normally, normally my Friday. We'll try to be back on Friday next week for another update. But guys, always appreciate you being here. And remember, as I always say, your opportunity begins at the end of your excuses. I'll see you on the next episode.

Do this. If you're serious about building an e-commerce business starting on Amazon FBA, what if myself and my team worked with you one-on-one to execute the steps outlined in the podcast while helping you discover what the heck to sell? How to make sure it's profitable, and how to successfully launch a brand. Plus, how to do it under a consulting plus performance-driven model where I put a $10,000 skin-in-the-game guarantee for those that show up and are serious about building a real business done with us. If yes, text keyword profit to +1-417-413-4209. That's 1-417-413-4209. Then I will personally respond with a few simple questions. If you're not in the US or Canada, please visit voltage dm dot com. That's voltage dm dot com. Click get started and book a no-pressure discovery call with me or a member of my team to learn more about the Business Builders one-on-one coaching and mentoring for CEOs, entrepreneurs, and those looking to build an empire or retire using the power of e-commerce. Once again, thank you for listening, and be sure to tune in next week for a brand new episode of the High Voltage Business Builders Podcast.