Black Friday early access for your VIP customers

Why give some customers a head start

Early access lets your best customers shop the sale a few days before everyone else. They get first pick of sizes and colours while stock is full, and you get orders spread over more days instead of one packed weekend.

It also rewards people without a deeper discount. The VIP pays the same sale price the public will pay on Friday, only sooner, so each early order earns you the same as a Black Friday order.

Decide who counts as a VIP

Pick a rule you could explain to a customer who asks why they were left out: everyone who has ordered at least twice, everyone who spent over a set amount in the last year, or everyone on your newsletter.

In Shopify the simplest way to mark those people is a customer tag, such as VIP. You can add it on a single customer's page, or filter the Customers list, select the matching customers and add the tag to all of them at once. An automation app such as Shopify Flow can keep tagging new customers who meet the rule.

Tag everyone before the invitation email goes out, so nobody clicks through to a price they cannot get.

A code or a customer tag

There are two ways to keep the offer to that group.

• A discount code in the email. It works on any plan and for guests who never made an account. The weak spot is that a code travels: if it lands on a coupon site on Monday, anyone can get the Friday price four days early. Limit it to one use per customer and end it when the public sale starts.
• An automatic discount for tagged customers. It applies only when a signed-in customer carries the tag. Anyone else who hears about it still pays the normal price until Friday. The cost is one extra step for the VIP: they have to sign in to their customer account before checkout.

On the Pro plan, Discount Easy has a “Who gets this discount” section on automatic campaigns, where you list customer tags (and, if you like, countries). Shoppers without a matching tag do not see that campaign's sale badges, timers or tier tables either, so a guest is never shown a price the checkout will not give. Campaigns that use a code are not limited by tag, because there the code decides who gets the discount.

Schedule the two campaigns back to back

Treat early access and the public sale as two separate campaigns with their own dates and times. One should end where the other starts.

Set the end time of the early-access campaign rather than leaving it open. With no end date, it would carry on next to the public sale and then into December. On Pro, the campaign calendar puts both campaigns on one timeline, which makes a gap or an overlap easy to spot.

If you sell to consumers in the EU, the reduction you announce publicly still needs the lowest prior price next to it. Our post on the Omnibus Directive explains what that is (it is general information, not legal advice).

Keep the VIP price from stacking

Your most loyal customers are also the ones most likely to hold other codes: a welcome code from last year, an apology code for a late parcel, a code from a partner.

If that is not what you intended, stop the two from combining. In Discount Easy on Pro, tick “Don't combine with other discounts” on the early-access campaign. No discount code and no other product or order discount is then added on top of it; Shopify applies whichever one saves the shopper more. Free shipping still combines, so the cheaper thank-you from the first example keeps working.

What VIPs see in the store

A signed-in VIP sees the sale where they shop: a sale badge on the product, the reduced price, and, if you turn it on, a countdown to the end of early access on Thursday night. The countdown needs the campaign's end date, which is one more reason to set it. A guest on the same product page sees the regular product until Friday.

The invitation email does most of the work. Tell VIPs plainly that the prices appear after they sign in, link to your store's sign-in page, and say when early access ends. If you only ship to some countries, add those countries to the campaign as well, so the offer shows only where you can deliver.

Test it as both kinds of shopper

Before the email goes out on Monday morning, walk through the store twice.

• As a VIP. Create a test customer with your own email address and add the VIP tag. Sign in, open a product from the collection and check the badge and the price. Go to checkout and check that the 20% applies.
• As a guest. Sign out or open a private window. The same product should show no badge and the full price, and checkout should charge the full price.
• With a code. As the VIP, enter one of your other codes at checkout. If you blocked stacking, only one discount should remain.

Our Black Friday and Cyber Monday checklist covers the rest of the testing for the public weekend.

After the weekend

Because early access ran as its own campaign, you can see what it did on its own: how many orders came in before Friday, their revenue and their average order value. On the Basic and Pro plans Discount Easy reports these per campaign and exports them to CSV, so you can set the VIP days against the public weekend and decide whether to repeat it for a December sale.