Every year we see the same pattern. In October, e-commerce owners are convinced that this time Black Friday will run smoothly. On the first Friday of November, the server chokes, the courier integration dies, the cart no longer honours discount codes, and customer support gets five times the usual load and gives up after two hours. In this article we share the ready-to-use checklist that eliminates most of these situations, if you kick it off in time.
Six weeks before: infrastructure
Six weeks before peak sales is the moment to answer whether the current infrastructure can handle a tenfold spike in traffic. The simplest test is a load simulation with k6, Gatling, or Locust running a realistic scenario: home page, category listing, add to cart, checkout. If the store runs on WordPress WooCommerce, the answer is almost always "not without a cache layer", which means Varnish or Cloudflare Cache in front of the app and, if not already done, moving media to a CDN.
If the store runs on Shopify or Shopify Plus, most infrastructure problems are handled by the platform. Still, you should test your own Shopify apps, ERP integrations, email systems, and the payment flow. A common issue is Klarna, Przelewy24, or Blik, which look fast on the client side but jam the back-office at a hundred concurrent transactions.
Four weeks before: logistics and operations
Four weeks out you verify the supply chain and courier contracts. InPost, DPD, DHL, and UPS all run at capacity in the November peak and often impose parcel limits per day. Talking to your account manager a month ahead either expands the cap or lets you distribute volume across multiple carriers on purpose. At the same time you prepare a backup warehouse or packing team in case your own cannot keep up with the order count.
The second area is customer service. Support volume during Black Friday is five to ten times higher than on a normal day. Without preparation the team burns out within two days. The minimum plan is to add an AI assistant on first line for the period and prepare a set of ready replies for the 20-30 most common questions. If budget allows, hire extra agents for four days.
Two weeks before: marketing and data
Two weeks before the event you finish all marketing creatives: site banners, newsletters, social posts, Google Ads and Meta Ads campaigns. All discount codes are tested in staging, including edge cases like category-specific coupons or minimum cart value. Every untested coupon is a potential source of thousands of tickets on the day.
In parallel you verify event tracking. Nothing hurts more than Black Friday without complete conversion data, because after the fact there is nothing to optimise the next campaign against. You check Google Analytics 4, Facebook Conversions API, ad platform pixels, and enhanced conversions. If you use server-side tracking, test the full path from ad click to order confirmation.
One week before: the dress rehearsal
- Full load test on production during off-hours
- End-to-end purchase test for every payment method available in the store
- Full return flow simulation in the real configuration
- Database backup verification and a test restore in isolation
- Review of permissions and access logs in the admin panel
- Assignment of incident roles: who decides, who communicates, who deploys
Black Friday is not won by the cheapest store. It is won by the one that stays up for four days straight.
During the event
On the day of the event the rule is one: ship nothing new. Every patch, even seemingly harmless ones, can destabilise the system at the worst possible moment. The tech team is on rotating shifts and a monitoring dashboard, Grafana or Datadog, shows the key metrics in real time: response time, transactions per minute, fulfilment queue, abandoned cart size.
Support has a clear playbook for the three most common problems: failed payment, missing order confirmation email, stale product availability. Each has a defined procedure and a decision on what the customer gets as compensation. Without it your team will make hundreds of micro-decisions under pressure and a share of them will end in complaints.
After the event: what to measure
On the first Monday after Black Friday the team meets for a one-hour retro. You cover three things: what went according to plan, what did not and why, and what decisions we take for next year. Metrics worth capturing: conversion compared to a normal week, average order value, return rate in the first month after the event, customer service cost per order, and net result after accounting for discount and marketing costs.
The biggest value of Black Friday for a mature business is not one-off revenue but data that lets you plan next year much better. Stores that track year-over-year comparisons on the same metrics end up, after three editions, with an operational playbook no consultant can sell them.
The most common mistakes of the past two years
The last two editions of Black Friday revealed a few recurring problems in Polish stores. The first is underestimating the impact of discounts on returns. The average return rate after Black Friday is 20-30 percent higher than in a normal month, and in some categories like women's fashion it exceeds 40 percent. If your budget does not include a reserve for handling these returns, December can end up worse than October.
The second mistake is overly aggressive discounting that trains customers to wait for price drops. Companies that cut prices by 50 percent every November lose full-price sales in September and October because loyal customers hold off. A better approach is a 20-30 percent discount on selected categories combined with free delivery or a bundled product, rather than a blanket site-wide cut.
The third mistake is a promotion window that is too short. A classic single-day Black Friday produces a traffic spike that breaks both infrastructure and support. Stretching the event across seven to ten days, with different offers in different phases, spreads orders more evenly and lets the team work at a normal pace. In 2025 this strategy delivered better sales results for most of our clients than a single-day peak.
Takeaway
Black Friday is not a campaign, it is an operational stress test. Stores that take it seriously from September earn more in November than in the whole third quarter. Stores that improvise in the last week lose customers to competitors and keep them gone for longer than one season. The checklist above does not guarantee success, but applied properly it eliminates most of the mistakes that cost the most.