Why So Many Sellers Are Quietly Skipping Black Friday

For most of Amazon’s history, Black Friday had a simple script: you slash prices, Amazon blasts out a press release about “millions of deals,” and everyone enjoys the illusion that more volume equals more profit. Sellers treated it like a festival: loud, messy, slightly irrational, but somehow worth it.

But this year, something snapped. A surprising number of brands looked at their margins, looked at their landed costs, looked at Amazon’s fee schedule… and decided the most rational Black Friday strategy was simply not playing the game. It’s the first holiday season where skipping the discount circus makes more financial sense than joining it.

The problem starts long before a product shows up in FBA. Tariffs have quietly turned importing into a kind of negative compounding exercise: China gets hit with one tariff, then another, then a “reciprocity” tariff for good measure. India, once the backup plan, now carries its own surcharges. For many sellers, COGS now rises faster than demand.

And then Amazon takes its turn. There’s the 15% referral fee, the rising FBA pick-and-pack rates, the storage fees that feel like Manhattan rent, and the sponsored ads you’re forced to buy just to be visible. By the time you get to Black Friday, your product is carrying more fees than a checking account at a shady local bank. The idea of throwing an additional 20–30% discount on top of that starts to feel less like marketing and more like self-harm.

Meanwhile, consumers are living in an entirely different reality. Deloitte says people plan to spend less this year but somehow still expect bigger deals. It’s the perfect holiday paradox: shoppers want discounts, sellers want margins, and Amazon wants… both. And the only way that triangle works is if the seller takes the hit.

That’s why this year feels different. The smartest operators aren’t chasing badges but are protecting their balance sheets. They’re shrinking their discounts, or skipping them entirely, or quietly raising prices in October so they can pretend to discount in November. Black Friday hasn’t disappeared; it’s just become a psychological game where sellers ask themselves how much of their margin are they willing to sacrifice for velocity they might not recoup.

Amazon, naturally, will be fine. If one seller won’t fund a deal, another might. And if enough pull back, Amazon Retail will simply carpet-bomb the homepage with half-off Bose and Ninja promos, declare the event a triumph, and move on. The machine always wins, because the machine always finds someone willing to pay.

The irony, of course, is that December will still be enormous. The last ten days before Christmas generate panic-buying levels of demand that overwhelm all rational behavior. Nobody is comparison-shopping tariffs on December 22. They’re pressing “Buy Now” and praying the gift arrives on time. Peak desperation remains undefeated.

But strip away the decorations and the hype, and the holiday truth is hard to miss: Black Friday is no longer a growth lever but a liability you have to manage.

The celebration is over.
The spreadsheets have taken over.
And the sellers who survive 2025 will be the ones who finally admit that a deal is only a deal if everyone benefits… not just the platform.