Peak season may be months away—but the brands that win Q4 are already getting to work. Swap’s BFCM Playbook breaks down 5 essential steps to take between now and September to drive profit, avoid chaos, and turn Q4 wins into Q1 momentum.

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Inside the Playbook

• The $65.50 mistake most brands make on returns—and how to fix it

• The July campaign that builds high-intent audiences for Q4

• How Allbirds and others tariff-proofed their logistics to avoid shipping disasters

The post-holiday season is in full swing and that means one thing for retailers: returns, and lots of them. UPS estimated that it will process 1.75 million returned packages on the most popular day for returns: January 4th. To dive deeper into the topic of returns and better understand why customers are rushing to give back their gifts, the team here at Akeneo conducted a survey to uncover the truth about why shoppers return products, what they expect from brands, and how businesses can minimize return rates while keeping customers happy. 

The majority of shoppers (63%) will abandon shopping carts after a maximum of two purchase attempts. The Applause survey was distributed in two parts, first in November 2024 on general holiday shopping plans and experiences, and second in December 2024 regarding respondents’ actual shopping experiences between Black Friday and Cyber Monday.

The survey found that despite continuing concerns around inflation and financial instability, consumers plan to spend more this year — though they are planning to spend smarter by paying more attention to sales and discounts. They are also becoming increasingly intolerant of poor purchasing experiences, prioritizing seamless checkout, ease-of-use and convenience.

Step behind the curtain of Black Friday and Cyber Monday 2024 to discover how the best brands broke records, how top-performing brands allocated spend during peak, which channel had the lowest CPM this BFCM, how one channel quickly became one to watch in 2025 as well as how to leverage your BFCM data for 2025 success.

The period between Thanksgiving and Cyber Monday, known as the Cyber Five, is a clear mile marker to start holiday shopping for many consumers, and, as such, is a pivotal stretch for many marketers. Here we’ll take a look at some of the key trends that emerged from this year’s Cyber Five for Tinuiti clients under management, including how the shift in the timing of Thanksgiving impacted sales and ad pricing.

This past Thanksgiving week, furniture and home decor brand CB2 used artificial intelligence as part of its text messaging marketing campaigns. Over the busy holiday sales periods like Black Friday and Cyber Monday, when so many retailers are trying to reach customers, the more targeted messages helped the brand stand out from the crowd, said Ami Patel, CB2’s associate director of brand marketing.

Retailers and brands have faced a challenging 2024, making a successful holiday season more crucial than ever. According to Adobe Analytics, online shoppers spent a record-breaking $10.8 billion this Black Friday. The biggest retail event of the year gave Listrak’s savvy clients an opportunity to outperform the competition and win consumer dollars with AI-powered, hyper-targeted, omnichannel messaging. Our experts have crunched the numbers and analyzed retailer strategy and results in order to bring you an informative recap of our Black Friday retail marketing data.

The frenzy of Cyber weekend 2024 has now passed! And we’ve wrapped up our annual breakdown of ecommerce performance. Analyzing over a hundred million website visits to over a thousand Nosto-powered stores, here’s your breakdown of how retail’s most anticipated weekend looked for ecommerce this year.

Overall weekend performance

Percentages represent year-on-year increases and decreases.

Traffic: +14.71%