Black Friday sale ideas for a small store in India: 10 offers and the maths

TL;DR

• • Know what one order leaves you before you pick a percentage. 20% off can take away more than a third of it.
• • One hero markdown for the headline; everything else lifts order size.
• • One code, four days, with a minimum order, a cap and an expiry of 30 November.
• • Free delivery above a value is the cheapest offer you can run and the cart bar sells it for you.
• • Buy 2 Get 1 and the welcome popup are Growth; the other eight offers are free.
• • Monday night: the coupon expires on its own; you put the prices back by hand.

First, what a discount does to one order

Landed cost is what one delivered order costs you: the product, the box, the packing and the payment charge. Here is a worked example with made-up numbers: a product sold at ₹1,299 with a landed cost of ₹600 (product ₹520, box ₹40, packing and payment charge ₹40). The buyer pays a ₹100 delivery charge that covers the courier, so delivery is neutral until you make it free. That leaves ₹699 on a full-price order. Watch what each offer does to it.

Example figures only. Multi-unit rows assume the units share one box, one packing charge and one courier.

Two lessons. A flat 20% needs a lot more orders just to get back to where you were. And the offers that only fire on a bigger cart, a capped coupon above a minimum, free delivery above a value, Buy 2 Get 1, cost you a little per unit and leave you far more per order. Run your own figures through the discount calculator and the profit margin calculator before you announce anything.

1. Mark down one hero product, not the catalogue

Every sale needs a headline: “Earbuds ₹999, were ₹1,499.” Pick one product per group that buyers already know the price of, mark it down properly, and let it carry the sale. The rest of the catalogue stays at full price and is bought on the way to the hero.

On SitesPlaced, open the product, put the sale price in Price and the old price in Original price. The original shows struck through next to the price on every template; the Electronics Store card also prints the percentage off. Free. On Monday night, clear the Original price field and the product is back to normal. There is no scheduler, so set a reminder.

2. One code for four days, with a minimum, a cap and an expiry

A coupon is a code the buyer types in the cart. One code for the whole sale, BLACKFRIDAY, is easier to remember and to post than a code a day. The three settings that protect you are the minimum order, so it only fires on carts worth having; the cap, so a 15% code on a ₹4,999 cart gives away ₹150 and not ₹750; and the expiry, so nobody uses the screenshot in January.

Under Settings → Discounts, create the code, choose percent or flat, then open More rules: set Minimum order value ₹1,999, Max discount ₹150 and Expires 30 November. The code works through the end of that day and shows as invalid after it. You can limit it to one category, and untick Active the moment you want it gone. There is no total-uses cap. One more rule to set: Sale items decides what the code does to products that already have an Original price, so choose Not valid on sale items or Calculate on the original price and the hero is not discounted twice. Free on every plan.

3. Free delivery above a value, with the bar in the cart

This is the cheapest offer in the list and the one that works on the most buyers. In the table it costs you ₹1 per unit and nearly doubles what the order leaves you, because the second item shares the box. The buyer sees “add ₹400 more for free delivery” and adds a case.

Under Settings → Shipping, set a Delivery charge and a Free delivery above amount. As soon as both are set, the storefront shows a bar in the cart saying how much more to add; it is free on every plan. The threshold is checked on the cart before any coupon, so a buyer who used BLACKFRIDAY does not lose free delivery, and coupons never discount the delivery charge itself. Pick a threshold a little above what your buyers usually spend; How to increase average order value helps choose the number.

4. A Black Friday bundle, priced as one product

A bundle is three things sold as one product for a little less than the three apart: “Winter set: hoodie, beanie, socks, ₹1,299” when the three cost ₹1,547 separately. It is not a discount setting; it is a product you create under Products with its own photo, price and stock. It moves slower items with fast ones, ships in one box, and the buyer sees a deal without you touching the price of any single. If the parts come in sizes, add them as options on the bundle. Free.

5. Buy 2 Get 1 on things people buy in multiples (Growth)

Buy X Get Y is an automatic offer: the buyer adds three, pays for two. Per unit it is the biggest discount in the table, a third off, but it only fires when the buyer takes three, so every discounted order is a bigger order sharing one courier. It works on socks, phone cases, soaps, cables, cookies, candles, and not on a product nobody wants three of.

On SitesPlaced, Buy X Get Y is part of the Growth plan (₹499 a month, or ₹499 once for 30 days with no autopay). Under Settings → Discounts → Offers, name it, set Buy quantity 2 and Get free 1, and choose all products or one category. The cheapest eligible item in the cart is free, and the discount is worked out on the server at checkout, so a tampered cart cannot claim it.

6. Early access on Thursday evening for your WhatsApp list

The people who already buy from you deserve to see the sale first, and an early-access window on Thursday 26 November spreads your packing across an extra day. Make a second coupon, EARLY, with the same rules as the main code but expiring on Friday, and share it only with people who have chosen to hear from you: your WhatsApp broadcast list, your status, last month’s buyers. The public code starts Friday morning. Ready-to-send messages for each moment of the sale are in Black Friday WhatsApp messages for customers. Free.

7. A code for first-time visitors, through the welcome popup (Growth)

A sale brings strangers from Instagram who have never bought from you. The welcome popup shows a first-time visitor a coupon the moment they land, and can ask for their email before it reveals the code, so you keep the address for Christmas. Under Settings → Sales boosters, tick Show a promo popup to first-time visitors, write the heading and pick the coupon from your active codes. It is a Growth feature; the sales boosters page lists the rest. Use a different code from the public one so you can see in Orders which brought each buyer.

8. Clear Diwali leftovers in a Clearance category

By Black Friday, Diwali is three weeks behind you and some of that stock is still on the shelf. It is the right week to turn it into cash, because the buyers are already looking for a price. Set an Original price on each leftover product, put them all in a Clearance category so they have one page you can link to, and keep the main coupon off them with the coupon’s category rule. What has not sold by Monday night, archive: Archive takes a product off the store without deleting it, and Restore to store brings it back next October. Free. The Diwali offers themselves are in Diwali sale ideas that don’t eat your profit.

9. Free gift wrap for early Christmas shoppers, no discount

Christmas is Friday 25 December, four weeks after the sale, and a share of your Black Friday buyers are buying gifts early. They do not need a discount; they need the thing to arrive looking like a present. If you sell gift wrap as a paid extra on your products (set per product under Personalisation & extras), set it to ₹0 for the four days and say “free gift wrap this weekend” in the announcement bar. It costs you paper and ribbon. Free.

10. Last hours on Monday, run by the coupon expiry

The end of a sale sells as much as the start, and you do not need a timer for it. The coupon’s Expires date does the work: set to 30 November, it works through the end of that day and is refused on Tuesday morning. On Monday, edit the announcement bar by hand to “Last day: code BLACKFRIDAY ends tonight”, send the last-hours message to your list, and let the clock run out.

On Tuesday, two things to do by hand: untick Active on any code you want gone before its expiry, and clear the Original price on the hero products. The cart shows live prices, so a buyer who kept Monday’s cart open sees Tuesday’s price when they come back. A sale that ends when you said it would is what makes the next one work.

The ten offers, the setting and the plan

Setting these up on SitesPlaced

Coupons with a minimum, a cap and an expiry, Original prices, the free-delivery bar, bundles as products, categories, the announcement bar, personalisation extras and Archive are all on the free plan, which costs ₹0 with 0% commission and takes UPI, cards, cash on delivery and WhatsApp orders. Buy X Get Y and the welcome popup are part of Growth at ₹499 a month, or ₹499 once for 30 days with no autopay, or ₹4,990 once for a year.

Starter, at ₹199 a month or ₹199 once for 30 days, gives you your own domain, removes the badge, adds store analytics so you can see which of the ten actually moved orders, and makes your store’s pages answer about 4× faster than on the free plan: about 75 ms instead of about 330 ms, measured on live paid stores on 28 September 2026. “Answer” means how soon the page starts arriving, before the photos load. The code FREE7 gives 7 days free on Starter or Growth when you set up autopay; cancel before the first charge and you pay nothing. The whole season’s plan is on the Black Friday page for sellers.

Frequently asked questions