It’s Wednesday, I’m Nithya Sudhir. I collect words, chase patterns, and write about whatever makes me curious.
In Philadelphia in the 1950s, the police had a name for the day after Thanksgiving. They called it Black Friday, not for the accounting, for the sidewalks. Every year they flooded with shoppers, and every year the traffic cops dreaded working it. Retailers only reached for the friendlier story later: the one where the day is called that because it's when the year's books finally move from red to black.
Same day, two different reasons someone might call it that. Which is a fitting way to think about the page a shopper actually lands on this BFCM, because what looks like one page is really four separate decisions stacked on top of each other. Does this feel simple enough to trust. Is this tier obviously the right one. Does this price feel like a real discount. Can I actually pay for it without a second thought.
Four essays this year, one for each of those decisions, in the order a shopper hits them.
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Why simple products earn trust faster.
In an experiment by Norbert Schwarz and Hyunjin Song, people given the exact same instructions in a clean, easy-to-read font estimated the task would take eight minutes. The same instructions in a difficult font, nearly fifteen. Same task. The only thing that changed was how much effort it looked like it would take. That's cognitive fluency, and it's why a busy, over-explained BFCM landing page reads as more work before a shopper has read a single price. Bite built an entire toothpaste brand on three obvious steps, bite, brush, rinse, and let customers talk about how easy it felt before they mentioned the sustainability angle at all. Before a shopper trusts a discount, they have to trust that the page in front of them isn't going to make them think.
Once the page feels simple enough to trust, the shopper hits the next decision: which option is actually the smart one to pick.
The magic trick behind every "choice."
Dan Ariely once offered his students three subscription plans, an online plan, a print-only plan nobody wanted, and a combined print-and-online plan at the same price as print-only. With all three on the table, 84% picked the combined plan. Remove the print-only option and offer just two, and the numbers flip completely, most people suddenly want the cheap one. The decoy wasn't there to be bought. It was there to make one specific option look like the only sensible choice in the room. Every "Basic, Standard, Premium" ladder does this on purpose, and BFCM bundle pages are usually three of these ladders stacked at once. Before deciding what to discount, the essay's real question is which option in your lineup exists purely to make another one look smart.
💭 Which part of your BFCM setup needs the most work this year?
Once the tier is obvious, the shopper looks at one number: the price itself, and whether it's actually worth clicking on.
How left-digit bias shapes buying decisions.
There's no real difference between $9.99 and $10. It's one cent. Shoppers don't read prices the way accountants do, though, they anchor on the leftmost digit, which is why $49.99 vs $50 registers as a bigger gap than the one cent actually is. Warby Parker built an entire pricing ladder on this, entry frames at $95 and premium frames at $145, so the jump between tiers never crosses into a new hundred and never feels like the leap it actually is. For a BFCM discount specifically, this means the number that gets crossed out matters as much as the number that replaces it. A price that crosses a left-digit boundary reads as a real discount. One that doesn't just reads as rounding.
The price looks right, the tier is obvious, the page feels simple. The last thing standing between a shopper and checkout is the total itself.
Choice bracketing, optimism bias, and why "Pay in 4" works so well.
A £240 order asks one question: is this worth £240. Split it into four payments and the question quietly becomes: is this worth £60 today. That's choice bracketing, and it's doing more work than most brands give it credit for, spending money literally activates pain centers in the brain, and spreading that pain across four smaller moments weakens it each time. Stripe ran an A/B test across 150,000+ checkouts and found more than two-thirds of all BNPL volume was net-new, sales that wouldn't have happened at all without the option sitting there. For a BFCM cart that's larger than usual, "Pay in 4" isn't just a payment method. It's the thing standing between a shopper closing the tab and actually checking out.
How's the depth of today's edition?
Trust, tier, price, payment. Four separate moments a shopper has to clear before checkout even loads, and BFCM is the one weekend a brand asks all four to hold up at once, under more traffic than any other day of the year.
As always, hit reply if something in here hits home.
Until next week,
Nithya
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