Posted: Monday, 10 November 2025 @ 10:17
Black Friday has become increasingly important to UK businesses over the last 10 years, with major players taking up the traditional US holiday sales period after Thanksgiving. As a result, it's filtered through to smaller organisations, becoming an expected opportunity for consumers to maximise their budgets on purchases before Christmas.
For businesses, making the most of the commercial opportunity is often considered vital to overall annual sales figures, but ensuring you have everything in place to do that involves planning, and indeed, finance. In this article we look at the top things UK SMEs care about on Black Friday and how the right funding solutions can help.
What do UK SMEs care about most on Black Friday?
Looking at a collection of surveys, as well as asking SMEs what their main focuses, concerns, and goals are around Black Friday and the year‑end sales period, the top areas of consideration for businesses and business owners fell into the following categories:
Working capital and cash flow support
They often need extra capital ahead of Black Friday to build inventory, cover marketing spend, and manage staffing.
Inventory and supply chain readiness
Getting the right products in stock in sufficient quantities is a big concern, especially for retailers. If inventory is low or delayed, sales opportunities are lost, so this is a matter of planning in advance - forecasting demand, ensuring orders are delivered on time, and having the capacity to handle returns or refunds.
Technological readiness and customer experience
Ensuring websites can handle traffic spikes, that the online user experience, payment methods (fast checkout, buy‑now‑pay‑later capabilities, and digital wallets) are working well is crucial to maximising sales and reputation.
Marketing and customer acquisition or retention
Investing in marketing is essential for competing in a busy marketplace. For example, making promotions visible and attractive through discounts, bundles, and exclusive deals, as well as engaging existing customers (email lists, loyalty rewards), and using social media, as well as digital ads to draw in new customers.
Regulatory and reputational risks
Avoiding legal issues such as making sure promotional offers are compliant, while ensuring cybersecurity is set up to protect the business and customers against scams, by ensuring the IT stack is secure is a big area of focus.
Cost pressures
The rising costs of raw materials, labour, energy, and so forth are squeezing the margins, meaning SMEs need to be extremely careful about how deep discounts are. This places even more pressure on savvy and effective marketing campaigns as well as cash flow management as businesses go from very busy to very quiet periods.
Key challenges or risks for SMEs
With so much going on, it's easy for challenges and risks to occur around the seasonal sales period. The most common things that tend to trip SMEs up around Black Friday include:
- Overpromising (e.g. stock, delivery times) - which harms reputation
- Stockouts (running out of products, or too much of the wrong stock) — both cost money
- Technology or website failures during the traffic spike
- Regulatory penalties for misleading sales
- Inflexible financing or inability to access credit in time
How the right lender can help
Having the right funding in place can give businesses the breathing room to address all of these challenges and make the most of the sales season. However, we all know that this is where the details make all the difference - repayment terms. Here's how Rivers can help your clients.
Flexible, fast financing
We all value a prompt response, and in busy seasons SMEs are moving at pace. We know businesses value quick answers to funding applications and speedy access to capital, with repayment terms that accommodate sales seasonality.
How Rivers can help: When we have all the information, we need from you, our experienced underwriters will review your application and respond within 48 hours (excluding weekends and bank holidays). We have even been known to then have funds in client's accounts within a further 48 hours.
Cash flow bridges
Businesses look for funding solutions for lots of different reasons - it might be asset finance for new equipment, short-term business loans for sensible cash flow, or medium-term loans for longer-term business development.
How Rivers can help: Rivers offers a portfolio of funding solutions, including asset finances, leases, and loans, all of which are designed to support the realities of running a small or medium-sized business.
Transparency
Because margins are tight, small businesses are wary of hidden fees or challenging repayment clauses.
How Rivers can help: At Rivers we like to make sure everyone knows where they stand, so, we keep things clear and transparent at all times. For example, our business loans have a one-off arrangement fee at a flat rate. That fee can be added to the loan amount rather than deducted from it, so clients optimise the full benefit of the borrowing. Interest is fixed over the course of the term, and we are clear about repayment terms from the outset. For example, on short-term business loans repayments are made at 14-day intervals.
If you are a broker with clients looking for funding to support their Black Friday goals, speak to the team at Rivers to find out which of our solutions is best for them.
Contact Rivers