Black Friday 2026: Dates and a Checklist for Your Online Shop

When is Black Friday 2026? It falls on Friday 27 November, and Cyber Monday on Monday 30 November. The date is the same across Europe, although many shops stretch the campaign over the whole week, from the 23rd to the 30th. If you run an online shop, you have about five weeks to get it ready: able to handle the traffic, with discounts that follow EU law, and easy to buy from for a customer in another country.

Here is what to check, in the order you would do it.

When is Black Friday 2026?

• Black Friday: Friday 27 November 2026.
• Cyber Monday: Monday 30 November 2026.
• Black Week: Monday 23 to Monday 30 November, the week many shops turn into one long campaign.

Black Friday is always the day after Thanksgiving in the United States, which is the fourth Thursday of November. That is why the date is the same in Spain, France, Italy, Germany, Poland and the Czech Republic. What changes from one country to another is how long it lasts: in Germany people talk about Black Week, and in Poland or the Czech Republic some shops fill the whole of November with offers.

For you, as a shop owner, the date that really matters is a different one: the day you stop making changes to your shop. Ideally, everything is tested a week before, around 20 November.

How do I advertise discounts without breaking EU law?

This is the most expensive mistake, and the most common one. Since 2022, across the European Union, when you advertise a price reduction the "previous price" must be the lowest price you charged for that product in the previous 30 days. That is what the Omnibus Directive says, and the Court of Justice of the EU confirmed it in 2024 in the Aldi Süd case: the discount percentage is calculated on that lowest price, not on the last one.

An example. You sell a product at €100 throughout October. On 5 November you raise it to €120, and on the 27th you drop it to €90 with a "25% off" label. In the eyes of the law, your previous price is €100, so your real discount is 10%, and advertising 25% is misleading advertising.

• Don't raise prices in November only to cut them later: that is exactly what the law was written to stop.
• Check the crossed-out price. PrestaShop crosses out the product's regular price, but it does not check by itself what the lowest price of the last month was. That check is up to you.
• If you ran another offer in October, that offer price counts as the lowest. There are a few exceptions, such as perishable products or products that have been on sale for less than 30 days.

Will my shop handle the rush of visitors?

On Black Friday you can get several times your usual traffic, and almost all of it at the same times: first thing in the morning, after lunch and in the evening. If your shop already struggles on an ordinary Tuesday, you will notice it that day. We explain how to tell whether the problem is the shop or the server in your shop is slow: when it's the shop and when it's the server.

And not all that traffic is customers. During the campaign there are many more bots copying prices and crawlers going one by one through every filter combination in your catalogue. Each combination is a database query, and a handful of bots can request more pages than all your shoppers put together. That is what happens when a shop hits 100% CPU without selling any more. We explain it in bots and faceted search in PrestaShop, and it is what our anti-bot module for PrestaShop stops: it lets your customers and Google through, and cuts off mass crawling before it reaches the database.

Three things you can do now:

1. Talk to your hosting provider and ask whether your plan can handle a traffic spike, or whether they can upgrade it for that week.
2. Turn on PrestaShop's cache and make sure your images aren't too heavy: every second of loading time counts double when people are in a hurry to buy.
3. If you get a 500 error or a blank screen in the middle of the campaign, keep what to do about a 500 error in PrestaShop to hand.

Do you sell to other countries? Price, language and currency

Black Friday is the week when more people buy from a shop in another country for the first time. A Polish customer arriving from an ad wants to see the shop in Polish and the prices in złoty; a German customer wants to see the shipping cost to Germany before reaching the cart. If they have to hunt for a selector or do the maths, they go to the shop next door.

PrestaShop can have a price, a currency and a language for each country, but it doesn't pick them for you when a visitor arrives. That is what our geolocation module does: it detects the country and shows each customer their language, their currency and their price from the very first page. We go through it step by step in country-based pricing in PrestaShop.

And check how people pay. In Europe almost every card payment asks for a confirmation in the bank's app on the phone, and each country has its favourite method: iDEAL in the Netherlands, Bancontact in Belgium, Klarna and Sofort in Germany, BLIK in Poland. Place a test order with a real card, from your phone, before the 20th.

What happens with returns after Black Friday?

Orders placed on the 27th are delivered in early December, and the customer has 14 days to withdraw from the purchase once they receive it. In other words, your Black Friday returns arrive right in the middle of the Christmas campaign.

On top of that, since 19 June 2026 every online shop selling to consumers in the EU must offer a visible withdrawal button: the customer withdraws from the website itself, with a button and a confirmation, without having to write an email. If you don't have it yet, now is the time; we explain it in the mandatory withdrawal button, and our right of withdrawal module for PrestaShop sets it up for you, with its acknowledgement of receipt and a record of every request.

What should I check in the last week?

1. Make a full backup of your files and database, and keep it off the server.
2. Freeze changes. No theme or module updates and no new design that week. The exception is urgent security patches, like the one for PHP2Shell: those can't wait.
3. Place an order from start to finish: from your phone, with a voucher, with delivery to another country and with every payment method.
4. Check that emails go out for order and shipping confirmation. If they don't go out in PrestaShop 9, see the port 587 issue.
5. Check stock and delivery times for the products on offer, and show clearly the last day to order for delivery before Christmas.
6. Check your crossed-out prices against the 30-day rule.

Want to reach 27 November with peace of mind?

The anti-bot module, country geolocation and the withdrawal button mentioned in this article are right below, ready to install on your PrestaShop. And if you'd rather have someone go over your shop with you before the campaign, that is what we do with our PrestaShop maintenance.