After Halloween: switching your store to the next sale
Halloween is on Saturday, and Black Friday four weeks later. In between, the sale badges, timers and leftover stock all need a plan, ideally one made before Saturday night.
The problem with November 1
Halloween falls on a Saturday this year. By Sunday morning, a product page that still says “Spooky 25% off” under an orange ribbon looks like a shop nobody is minding. The price may still be fine. The decoration around it is a day out of date.
Most stores also have three busy weeks ahead before Black Friday on November 27, plus leftover Halloween stock to move. So the handover has three parts: end the Halloween look on time, decide what the store looks like in between, and have the Black Friday look ready before you need it.
Give the Halloween campaign an end time
A campaign with no end date keeps running, and so do its badges, photo labels and tier table. Set the end to Saturday, October 31 at 23:59, and the storefront goes back to normal on its own while you sleep.
The end date matters for the countdown timer too. In Discount Easy the timer counts down to the campaign's end, so a campaign without an end date cannot show one. A timer that reaches zero at midnight on Halloween is also an honest one: the offer really ends when it says it does. Timers are drawn on product pages, for product discounts; whole-order offers, Buy X Get Y and code campaigns do not show them.
Decide what happens to the leftover stock
Costumes, masks and themed decor sell slowly after October 31, and storing them until next autumn costs shelf space. A short clearance in the first week of November often makes more sense than a full-price wait. Work out what you can still afford before you pick the number.
A mask sells for $24 and costs you $9. During Halloween it was 25% off: $18, earning $9 per mask.
You have 40 left on November 1. At 40% off it sells for $14.40 and still earns $5.40 each, or $216 if all 40 go. At 60% off it sells for $9.60 and earns 60 cents, which barely covers packing.
So 40% is the deepest clearance worth running here. If the masks are still there on November 8, end the campaign and keep them for next year.
Give the clearance its own campaign, limited to the leftover products, with dates from Sunday, November 1 to Sunday, November 8. Keeping it separate from the Halloween campaign means it gets its own look and its own line in your results.
A look that is not Halloween any more
In Discount Easy each campaign has a Style setting, which decides how its sale badge, photo label, timer, tier table and cart goals bar look. When the Halloween campaign ends and the clearance starts, the storefront changes style with it. Nothing has to be switched by hand on the night.
For the clearance, an autumn style fits better than a Halloween one. The app has ready-made styles for 18 occasions, Autumn among them, in four variants each. An “Autumn Sale” badge on a leftover mask reads as a clearance; a ghost and “Boo!” on November 3 reads as a mistake.
Check the badge wording as well as the colours. Badge text uses {{discount}} as a placeholder, which each campaign fills with its own amount, so one style works for 25% and 40% alike. Words like “Before midnight” under a timer only make sense if the offer ends at midnight.
The quiet weeks in between
From November 9 to the start of your Black Friday offer, you can simply run nothing. Regular prices for two weeks also make your Black Friday price easier to present.
If you sell to consumers in the EU, this is the part to plan carefully. When you announce a reduction, you show the lowest price you charged in the 30 days before it. For a sale starting on November 27, those 30 days begin on October 28, so they include your Halloween and clearance prices.
The mask cost $18 during Halloween and $14.40 in the clearance. If it goes into the Black Friday sale at 30% off ($16.80), the lowest prior price on November 27 is $14.40, which is lower than the sale price.
A sweater that stayed at $80 all autumn has a lowest prior price of $80. Its 25% off on Black Friday ($60) is a straightforward reduction.
The simplest way to avoid that confusion is to keep products that ran in the clearance out of the Black Friday campaign, or accept that their reduction will look small. Some EU countries also have special rules for reductions that grow step by step. Our post on the Omnibus Directive explains the 30-day price in more detail. This is general information, not legal advice.
Have the Black Friday look saved before you need it
Choose and save the Black Friday and Cyber Monday styles in early November, when the store is quiet, and attach them to the campaigns when you schedule those. Seeing the badge on your own product photos a few weeks ahead leaves time to change a colour that clashes with your theme.
The number of saved styles depends on the plan: four on Basic and twenty on Pro (Free uses the default style only). Four is enough for this season if you reuse them. Halloween, Autumn, Black Friday and Cyber Monday take all four places, and once the clearance ends you can open the Halloween style and use “Change template” to turn it into your Christmas style.
Halloween: 25% off the Halloween collection, Halloween style, until Saturday, October 31 at 23:59, with a countdown timer.
Clearance: 40% off the leftover Halloween products, Autumn style, from Sunday, November 1 at 00:00 to Sunday, November 8 at 23:59.
Black Friday: 25% off the winter collection, Black Friday style, from Friday, November 27 at 00:00 to Sunday, November 29 at 23:59.
Cyber Monday: the same offer, Cyber Monday style, on Monday, November 30 from 00:00 to 23:59.
Each campaign ends where the next one starts, or there is a gap. If two campaigns cover the same product on the same dates, only the better discount applies, so an overlap rarely costs you money but can show the wrong badge. On Pro the editor warns about such overlaps, and the campaign calendar puts all four campaigns on one timeline.
Check the handover before the weekend
On Friday, open a Halloween product and check the badge, the price and the timer. Then look at the clearance campaign's products and settings once more: right products, right dates, Autumn style. On Sunday morning, open the same mask again. It should show the clearance badge in the autumn style, and a product outside the clearance should show its regular price with no badge at all.
When the clearance ends, compare it with the Halloween campaign in your campaign results. On Basic and Pro, Discount Easy reports orders and revenue per campaign and exports them to CSV, which tells you whether a week of clearance is worth repeating next year. For the rest of the run-up to the big weekend, see our Black Friday and Cyber Monday checklist.