5 ways Black Friday is reshaping the online payments landscape
When I first experienced it, Thanksgiving morning meant hauling in a newspaper so heavy with ads it barely fit through the mail slot.
It arrived like a phone book, packed with circulars from every retailer within fifty miles. Families gathered around the kitchen table after breakfast, still in pajamas, mapping out Christmas shopping routes on paper maps and calculating which parking lots would fill first. It was as much a part of the holiday as the turkey.
Over the decades, Black Friday has evolved from a brick-and-mortar ritual into a global eCommerce phenomenon.
With digital retail came new ways to extend momentum: through targeted emails, online-only deals, and sophisticated customer engagement. Technology lets retailers promote exactly what they wanted to exactly who they wanted. For online sellers, Black Friday became a way to harness seasonal excitement without the cost of physical stores. Omnichannel strategies helped others blend in-store energy with digital convenience, driving traffic both in person and online.
That evolution created new events like Small Business Saturday, launched by American Express, and Cyber Monday, the digital counterpart to Black Friday.
What began as a single day became a weekend, then a week, and now sometimes a full month. More importantly, Black Friday transformed not just how consumers shop, but how businesses—both online and offline—prepare for peak seasons.
Here are just some of the ways Black Friday has permanently altered eCommerce.
1. Peak season has become a year-round operational requirement
Black Friday didn’t just grow larger. It created an architecture for engineered peaks that now recur throughout the year. Cyber Monday, Singles’ Day, Prime Day, Ramadan promotions, mid-year festivals in Southeast Asia, and summer clearance periods in Europe all produce similar surges. In 2023, Prime Day generated $12.7 billion in global sales, according to Amazon—more than most national holiday peaks. Singles’ Day exceeded $150 billion in gross merchandise value in China, according to Alibaba.
These retail mega-events create tailwinds for the entire eCommerce ecosystem. Many businesses piggyback on customer awareness and readiness to spend with promotions of their own. Retailers—especially apparel brands competing with electronics—often launch early to capture attention before the noise hits. Meanwhile, chargebacks, returns, and post-holiday logistics keep teams busy well into January.
This proliferation has changed what operational readiness means. Payments infrastructure can no longer prepare for just one seasonal event. Volume volatility is now structural. Authorization rates can decline several percentage points during peak hours unless businesses use adaptive routing, acquirer failover, and issuer optimization to stabilize performance. Cart abandonment rises sharply when latency increases, and even minor 3DS delays degrade conversion. The discipline once reserved for Black Friday must now be maintained year-round.
In an always-on world, success depends less on the calendar and more on recognizing key “buying-power moments”—paydays, holidays, emotional peaks—when customers are both psychologically and financially ready to spend.
2. Personalization increasingly relies on payments intelligence
Promotional cycles have compressed, and consumers have learned to wait for discounts. During the 2023 Black Friday period, Adobe reported that more than 80% of U.S. shoppers compared prices across multiple retailers before making a purchase. Relevance is now the defining competitive advantage.
Payments data provides some of the most valuable signals for personalization because it reflects real behavioral intent—not just declared preferences.
Method preference, habitual spending times, issuer-specific approval patterns, retry responsiveness, cross-border behavior, and tokenized repeat purchase flows all generate insights that traditional marketing data often cannot. Businesses that use these signals to shape offer timing, payment method prompts, or channel prioritization see significantly higher conversion. Payments intelligence also reduces the need for indiscriminate discounting, helping businesses allocate promotions to those most likely to transact.
3. Black Friday has become a global payments signal
What started as a uniquely American retail ritual is now a global phenomenon driven by eCommerce. Adobe Analytics reported that U.S. Black Friday online spending reached $9.8 billion in 2023, a 7.5% year-over-year increase. Globally, platforms like Amazon, Mercado Libre, Noon, and Shopee have exported Black Friday to regions where the holiday itself has no cultural roots. In the Middle East, it’s called White Friday. In China, it competes with Singles’ Day. In Brazil, it ranks among the highest-volume eCommerce weeks of the year.
Whether this globalization works depends on the payments layer.
Local payment methods have been key to global expansion. They bridge the gap between global commerce and local access, making it easier for anyone, anywhere, to buy. Brazil’s real-time scheme PIX accounted for over 40% of eCommerce volume during peak periods, according to Banco Central do Brasil. India’s UPI surpassed 12 billion monthly transactions in 2023, with promotional cycles amplifying adoption further. Across Southeast Asia, cashless wallets surge during sale periods.
A global business looking to capitalize on Black Friday must ensure its payment stack feels local in every market. The global migration of this event has placed payments—rather than marketing—at the core of successful international expansion.
4. Omnichannel remains essential, but it must operate as a single system
The early Black Friday era relied on physical stores. Queues wrapped around malls. Inventory was managed locally. Payments happened almost exclusively at the point of sale. Layaway was the original Buy Now, Pay Later.
The shift to digital commerce didn’t eliminate stores. It changed their function.
Today, customers expect seamless continuity between channels. A promotion discovered on a mobile app must be redeemable in-store. Loyalty recognition, tokenized credentials, and preferred payment methods must transfer fluidly across touchpoints.
Black Friday exposes any weakness in fragmented omnichannel setups. If a website recognizes a tokenized card but the point of sale does not, the gap is immediately felt. If a promotion works online but not in-store, conversion drops for reasons that are entirely avoidable. Payments orchestration increasingly binds these environments into one system—ensuring identity, authentication, inventory, and settlement operate cohesively.
5. Black Friday has changed the definition of conversion
Black Friday has redefined what conversion means. Historically, it referred to a successful authorization. Today, conversion hinges on a sequence of payment decisions: routing strategy, issuer optimization, token performance, fraud controls, 3DS policies, local method availability, and cross-border processing.
During Black Friday 2023, Adobe reported cart abandonment rates nearing 70% during peak hours. This isn’t just a marketing problem. It reflects friction from authentication, mismatched methods, and failed payments.
Every millisecond of latency, every unnecessary 3DS challenge, and every avoidable decline becomes visible at scale. Black Friday demonstrates that conversion isn’t a single outcome—it’s a design issue that starts with the payment page and extends across the entire infrastructure.
A global retail event that now defines payments strategy
Like Mother’s Day—commercialized through deliberate promotion—Black Friday has developed its own gravitational pull. It will continue evolving, but its strategic relevance won’t fade.
For businesses, the takeaway is clear: Black Friday is not just a sales moment. It’s a live demonstration of how global consumers expect to pay—anywhere, across any channel, using any method, on infrastructure that performs under stress.
If I had to give three pieces of advice to businesses preparing for high-volume moments:
- Make sure your tech works. Your website, payment page, and infrastructure must operate flawlessly. Friction kills conversion. Test everything in advance.
- Get your marketing right. Know your audience, test pricing, and plan a campaign for the full season—not just one day. Shoppers browse for days, compare prices, and buy when the moment feels right.
- Prepare for risk and logistics. Plan for fraud, returns, and volume. Balance protection with seamless experiences that keep genuine customers transacting.
Laura Miller is Chief Revenue Officer and Global Head of eCommerce at Nuvei, leading relationships with major global enterprises and overseeing commercial teams across North America, Europe, MEA, APAC, and LATAM.
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