Black Friday and Cyber Monday (BFCM) are often the busiest days of the year for e-commerce. However, once the sales event is over, demand naturally drops back down to standard levels.

At Optiply, we call this post-rush period the "High Season Hangover." If an inventory forecasting system isn't smart enough, it might look at your massive Black Friday sales spike and assume that this volume is your new normal (a mathematical phenomenon called recency bias). This would lead to terrible recommendations, pushing you to massively overstock for a quiet December and January.

Rest assured, Optiply is highly aware of this drop. Our algorithm is specifically designed to differentiate between a temporary holiday sales spike and actual, sustainable business growth. Here is how we handle it.

To ensure your purchasing advice remains highly accurate after the holidays, Optiply applies a specialised logic to your baseline forecast during the BFCM period.

When calculating your general, long-term business growth trend, our system actively excludes the raw demand data from the Black Friday period.

Specifically, for the calculation of the growth trend, we do not take into account the demand from:

By intentionally "smoothing" out this 4.5-week period, the system understands that the sudden spike in sales is a temporary event, not a permanent upward trend. This prevents the system from suggesting you buy stock in January as if every day were Black Friday.

While we exclude this noisy data for your baseline trend calculation, we absolutely do use it for seasonal adjustments!

This means Optiply looks at your historical data (last year's Black Friday) to understand that this specific time of year is naturally busy. We use this historical footprint to ensure you have enough stock to cover the event itself, without letting the event skew your long-term daily forecast.

The short answer is no. You do not need to manually adjust your settings, pause your account, or worry about the system misinterpreting your BFCM sales data.

The algorithm is fully automated to protect your cash flow:

Consumer behaviour shifts heavily in November. Often, sales actually drop in the two weeks leading up to BFCM because customers are waiting for the big discounts. If we included this pre-BFCM dip in your trend calculation, the system might falsely assume your business is rapidly declining and advise you to order too little stock!

Yes! While our system uses your historical data for seasonal adjustments, if you are planning a massive new marketing campaign this year that will drive more traffic than last year's BFCM, you should use the Promotions feature to input that extra expected demand uplift.

No! While the raw BFCM trend is smoothed out, the system is still tracking your standard baseline demand, your actual physical stock levels, and historical December seasonality to ensure your Christmas inventory remains fully optimised.