What's behind major brands' Black Friday: data, AI, and real-time decisions

Black Friday is no longer just a date for sales. It has become a major testing ground for the technology that underpins digital retail. When traffic surges, systems are pushed to their limits, and every second of browsing can determine the success, or loss, of any sales operation. Behind the campaigns, offers, and virtual storefronts, there is an invisible ecosystem composed of strategy, data, automation, and intelligence that ensures everything functions successfully and in real-time. It is in this backstage that specialized companies, such as Quality Digital, have been establishing themselves as a strategic “arm” for the country's leading brands and marketplaces, helping to turn every interaction into learning and every sale into continuous intelligence.

Roberto Pereira Ave Faria, Vice President of Quality Digital, says it is necessary to be attentive to potential bottlenecks that often go unnoticed in daily operations but make a huge difference when sales pressure increases. “And Black Friday is undoubtedly a major test of the digital maturity of an operation,” he states.

In e-commerce, small changes can generate significant results. This is what happened with Pandora, for example, which was experiencing a drop in conversion rates for a simple reason: on long product pages, the purchase button would disappear during scrolling. The solution was to fix the button throughout the navigation, keeping the purchase action visible at all times. The impact was immediate, with a 2.5% increase in add-to-cart actions and a 1% increase in product views, generating 95% statistical significance. 

The same principle guided the work with Levi's, which had good traffic but a conversion rate below expectations. Behavioral analysis revealed a lack of stimuli at the decision moment. The inclusion of scarcity and exclusivity messages, such as “last units available in your region,” helped accelerate consumer decision-making, resulting in a 14% increase in add-to-cart actions and a 4% increase in completed orders.

“It's in the details of the journey that the difference happens. Sometimes, the problem isn't with the technology, but with the communication, the timing of the message, or the placement of a button,” explains Roberto.

At Kipling, the barrier was in the automatic shipping cost calculation, displayed too early in the journey, which led to drop-offs even before checkout. By redesigning the flow to display shipping costs on demand, Quality reduced cognitive friction and increased the purchase completion rate. For one of the country's major retailers, the company moved critical delivery and product availability information to the beginning of the navigation, ensuring predictability and establishing Delivery Promise as a permanent strategic differentiator. “Providing the right information at the right time is one of the pillars of a good experience. When the customer perceives transparency and fluidity, conversion comes naturally,” explains the executive.

One of the biggest challenges in e-commerce is cart abandonment, which reaches 80% in Brazil, according to E-commerce Radar. To reduce this loss, Quality Digital, in partnership with Tá no Bolso, launched Chat-Commerce, a solution that moves the purchase journey to WhatsApp, a channel used by over 90% of Brazilians.

The customer can resume the cart, review the order, and complete the payment directly within the app, without redirects. “With Chat-Commerce, retail begins to be where the customer really is. The boundary between website and conversation disappears, and the journey becomes continuous and natural,” highlights Roberto. During the 2024 Black Friday, the cart recovery tool achieved a 5% conversion rate and generated over R$ 160 thousand in additional net revenue in just a few weeks for one client, reaching an ROI of 742%. These results were obtained without the new AI version. For 2025, the expectation is that the evolved version with active selling and intelligent recommendation will reach 15% or more in conversion.

Furthermore, one of Quality Digital's new initiatives to support brands in 2025 has been Sinatra, an AI copilot for e-commerce capable of monitoring the entire digital journey and automatically correcting issues affecting conversion, inventory, and campaigns. The solution has already demonstrated real impact in large-scale operations: it prevented over US$ 1 million in internal fraud, corrected pricing errors in over 500 SKUs, and identified, in just 90 seconds, a coupon leak offering a 100% discount. “Sinatra represents the next stage of digital transformation in retail. We are moving from a post-event analysis model to real-time management, where AI acts preventively and autonomously,” states the VP.