Black Friday and Cyber Monday 2025: Strategic Agility for Inventory Planning

The Black Friday and Cyber Monday (BFCM) sales period has evolved far beyond a fleeting four-day frenzy. In 2025, Cyber Monday online sales hit a record $14.25 billion, the largest ever, while Black Friday reached $11.8 billion, up 9.1% YoY.

With sales records consistently being challenged, the successful navigation of this peak season hinges on proactive, technology-driven planning.

In our recent webinar, “Five Must-Have Demand Planning Strategies for Holiday Success” with industry experts, Sanjeev Balasubramaniam and Jeremy Martin, we explored the shift required for inventory planners: moving from static, historical reliance to dynamic, data-driven processes that blend human strategy with machine learning. The goal is simple: to build an agile planning system that senses change and adapts inventory before stock-outs or overstocks occur.

The Blurring Lines of Black Friday and Cyber Monday

The consumer mentality has shifted from waiting for a single, high-stakes weekend to anticipating a continuous stream of promotional events starting well before Thanksgiving. While the entire month is crucial, Cyber Monday (CM) remains the single highest-value online revenue day. Inventory depth planning must skew heavily toward CM, especially for high-ticket, electronically fulfilled items.

Retailers must actively manage promotional inventory across an extended timeline, often launching deals in early November. This staggered stock deployment minimizes logistics bottlenecks. Move beyond a weekly forecast. Implement a daily, dynamic stock allocation model for November to match the fluctuating promotional schedule, ensuring core early-bird SKUs don’t cannibalize critical BF/CM stock.

The Agile Planner’s Toolkit: Execution Strategies

Building Agile Forecasts: Sensing the Real-Time Market

Agility in forecasting requires moving beyond “set it and forget it” quarterly plans to models that adapt weekly or even daily. This is the core of agility. Instead of relying solely on long-term historical sales, demand sensing utilizes real-time, short-term data and advanced analytics to detect immediate shifts in customer behavior.

Integrate a wide range of internal and external signals: point-of-sale data, current promotions, click-stream data, and consumer sentiment. This allows you to catch immediate trends that a standard monthly review would miss. You can’t predict every disruption, but you can prepare for them. Effective planners use “sandbox measures,” which are adjustable levers within the planning system. Run various scenarios (e.g., the impact of a competitor’s price match, a key supplier delay, or a successful viral campaign) without altering the official plan until a consensus is reached.

Agility does not mean reacting to every small data spike, which can cause overcorrection and a costly “bullwhip effect” on inventory. Implement logic mechanisms to measure whether a data change is truly outside the norm before making corrections, ensuring you are agile but not hyper-reactive. Always account for cannibalization. Failing to account for this is a common oversight that leads to overstocking outdated models. When planning for new items or bundles, you must aggressively factor in cannibalization—the demand shifting away from older SKUs—to ensure the older stock is appropriately discounted or depleted.

Optimizing Inventory: Holding Smarter Stock

The goal of optimization is not necessarily holding more safety stock but holding smarter stock. Move away from rudimentary “Min/Max” replenishment methods. These methods simply order back up to a maximum number once a minimum is hit, regardless of future demand forecasts. Use a model that dynamically calculates model stock by location and SKU based on forward-looking data. This allows you to flex inventory levels up where forecast risk is highest while keeping them lean where demand is steady. To manage resources and planner time effectively, segment your portfolio using two axes:

• • ABC: Categorize based on importance to the brand, margin, and velocity (A being vital, high-margin, C being the long tail).

• • XYZ: Categorize based on forecast ability (X being stable and easy to forecast, Z being volatile and hard to predict).

Focus your effort and human intervention on the AV and AZ segments—the high-value, high-risk items. A major cause of stockouts is the disconnect between high-level account planning and granular store-level replenishment. You must ensure that your “bottom-up” store forecast aligns with your “top-down” SKU forecast. Without this synchronization, you may have inventory at the distribution center but empty shelves at high-volume stores.

The Foundation: Data and AI (Managing Inputs, Not Outputs)

Technology acts as a multiplier for your strategy, but it requires a solid foundation. Before implementing advanced algorithms, you must ensure your data is structured, trusted, and usable. Clean and compile data from all sources (ERPs, spreadsheets, third parties) before generating plans. Advanced AI cannot fix fundamentally bad or incomplete data. AI and predictive analytics automate the heavy lifting of calculations. The role of the demand planner is no longer calculating outputs. The planner’s role must shift to managing human inputs—such as strategy, promotional calendars, new product launch details, and market intelligence—to guide the system’s logic and ensure the AI is working with the most current business context.

Collaboration and Execution: Bridging the Gaps

An accurate mathematical forecast is useless if it cannot be executed effectively across the organization. Sales teams view the world through opportunities, while operations teams view it through constraints and risks.

Effective planning requires a collaborative platform that visualizes these different perspectives—the mathematical truth, the sales opportunity, and the operational risk—to reach a consensus, often called Sales and Operations Planning (S&OP) or Integrated Business Planning (IBP). Remember, a plan is only as good as its execution. Collaborate with retailers and logistics teams to ensure that the product is not only shipped to the distribution center but is actively and correctly replenished to the store shelves to meet the demand you predicted.

Algo’s Solution: Making BFCM Stock Planning Simple

Algo’s inventory planning software simplifies the complex, high-stakes process of BFCM planning by operationalizing the agile strategies detailed below, turning months of manual work into automated, intelligent recommendations.

BFCM Challenge	Algo’s Feature & Simplification
Volatile Demand: Predicting spikes from early access deals and Cyber Monday promotions.	Dynamic Demand Sensing: Algo ingests real-time data (POS, web traffic, social sentiment) to auto-adjust forecasts daily, replacing static monthly spreadsheets with an instant, precise view of expected sales.
High Risk of Stock-outs: Running out of high-margin ‘A’ items during the peak rush.	AI-Driven Safety Stock: Automatically calculates and deploys dynamic safety stock levels by SKU and location, flexing inventory only where demand volatility and lead times dictate, ensuring readiness without wasteful overstock.
Organizational Silos: Disconnect between Sales, Marketing, and Operations plans.	Collaborative Workflow Sandbox: Provides a single platform where teams can run “sandbox” scenarios (e.g., impact of a $5 discount vs. a BOGO) and reach a consensus plan instantly, eliminating email chains and manual reconciliation.
Omnichannel Complexity: Managing stock split between e-commerce, stores, and BOPIS.	Centralized Inventory Visibility: Provides a single, accurate view of inventory across all nodes (DC, store, fulfillment) and automates the ring-fencing of stock for digital vs. in-store channels, safeguarding BOPIS/Curbside commitments.

Ready to Simplify Your Black Friday and Cyber Monday Planning for next year?

Stop relying on outdated spreadsheets and start sensing demand in real-time.

Algo empowers you to move beyond reactive planning and build the proactive, agile inventory strategy needed to dominate Black Friday and Cyber Monday.

Contact Algo today to see a live demo of our AI-powered planning platform and ensure your inventory is optimized for 2026 success.