Black Friday readiness: What to check with seven weeks to go

What went wrong last Black Friday, and has it been fixed?

Start with last year, because it's the most reliable guide you have. Gather the incidents, slowdowns, failed orders and customer complaints from last year's peak, then ask two questions of each one.

Was the root cause fixed, or just the symptom? And what has changed since? A new payment method, a new courier or a redesigned checkout can each bring back a problem you thought was solved.

While you're in last year's numbers, export them. Pull order volumes, traffic, conversion and best sellers by day and by hour from your reporting and your analytics. You'll want a like-for-like comparison during the event, not three weeks after it.

That data also tells you when your peak really is. For some retailers it starts the Monday before Black Friday. For others the biggest day is Cyber Monday, or the weekend before Christmas delivery cut-offs.

Once you know your window, you can decide whether to hold non-essential site changes during it. Keep that window short and based on your own trading pattern. The weeks before it are the time to get improvements live.

Is your Black Friday marketing calendar ready, online and in store?

Seven weeks out, your campaign calendar should be close to final. Check that every date has its content attached: creative signed off, landing pages built, emails written and scheduled, social posts drafted.

Then check that online and in store tell the same story. If a customer sees an offer on your homepage, store staff should know about it, the tills should honour it, and the window display shouldn't contradict it.

Where your offers go live on a schedule, test them in a staging environment first. Confirm the start and end times and the timezone the schedule runs on. Your offers and promotions setup is easier to correct now than at midnight on launch day.

Stacking rarely comes from one bad setting. It happens when several offers that each make sense on their own meet in the same basket: a sitewide percentage off, a voucher code, a multibuy, loyalty points and free delivery all applying at once.

Peak makes this more likely, because more offers run side by side and codes travel further. A single-use code shared on a voucher site, or a code from a previous campaign that was never switched off, can reach far more customers than it was meant for.

Before launch, it's worth checking:

• Which offers can combine, and which should exclude each other
• Whether discounts apply to items that are already reduced
• Whether free delivery thresholds are calculated before or after discounts
• That old campaign codes have expired and single-use codes really are single use

The quickest test is to build the most generous basket you can and see what the checkout charges, then compare it with the margin you planned for.

Email needs its own check too, because volume rises sharply at peak. Make sure SPF, DKIM and DMARC are set up for your sending domain and that marketing emails support one-click unsubscribe. Google's sender guidelines ask bulk senders to keep spam rates below 0.1% and never reach 0.3%, so watch your rate in Postmaster Tools as sends increase.

Finally, look at your product feeds. When sale prices change on the site but the feed lags behind, Google Merchant Center can disapprove products at exactly the moment you want them showing. Confirm how often your feed updates, and check it handles sale pricing correctly before the first promotion goes live.

Check the product structured data on your pages too. Google compares the price in your feed with the price on the landing page, so markup that still shows the full price during a sale can cause the same disapprovals. AI shopping tools increasingly draw on this product data as well, which gives you one more reason to keep it accurate.

How to check the scripts on your checkout before Black Friday

Your checkout runs more than your own code. Analytics, tag managers, chat widgets and marketing pixels all load there, and campaign season tends to add a few more.

List every script on your checkout and ask whether it still earns its place. Each one adds weight on mobile, and each one is a route in if its supplier is compromised.

PCI DSS v4.0.1 requirements 6.4.3 and 11.6.1 also expect you to keep an inventory of scripts on payment pages and detect unauthorised changes. Checkout Audit monitors this continuously, if you'd like the evidence in one place.

Can your stock, warehouse and delivery cope with peak demand?

Overselling hurts most at peak, when every cancelled order is a customer who could have bought elsewhere. If you sell online and in store, check that stock levels update across every channel quickly enough to keep up with your busiest hour.

Pets and Friends faced this across 19 stores and a growing online business. Their case study shows how live stock visibility between stores and website helped prevent overselling.

In the warehouse, compare last year's peak order volumes with what your team and your stock and warehouse system can pick and pack in a day. If there's a gap, you have time to adjust shifts, picking routes or packing stations now.

Delivery needs agreeing early too:

• Confirm capacity and collection times with your couriers for the peak window
• Set delivery promises your couriers can meet during the surge, and show them clearly at checkout
• Decide whether you'll extend your returns window for gifts, and say so on the site

Plan for customer service volume as well. "Where's my order?" contacts rise with every delayed parcel, so make sure order status emails go out at each stage and your team has the answers ready.

Who is on call over Black Friday, and what does your platform partner need from you?

Agree your own rota now, covering the full window your data identified rather than one day, and check it against booked holidays.

Decide who can make a call without waiting for sign-off. If a promotion is misbehaving at 9pm on Black Friday, someone on shift needs the authority to pause it.

Then bring your platform partner in early. Share your campaign calendar, your expected volumes and anything you're planning to launch, so they can plan around your peak rather than guess at it. Agree what counts as critical and how you'll escalate it.

The best relationships treat peak as one milestone in an ongoing roadmap. Sigma Sports have been with us since 2011, working to a continuous roadmap of new features across their websites. Their case study covers how that partnership has grown.

Check your analytics before peak trading starts

If your tracking breaks during Black Friday, you won't find out until you try to read the results. Place test orders now and confirm that purchase events, revenue and consent mode all record correctly in GA4.

It's also worth asking whether your tracking is already broken. A purchase event firing twice will inflate revenue, while a checkout change or a new consent banner can quietly stop events recording. Either way, you'd be judging peak on the wrong numbers.

The simplest check is to compare orders and revenue in GA4 with the orders in your platform over the last few weeks. Some gap is normal, but if it has widened recently or the analytics figure is higher, find out why before Black Friday.

AI tools can take a lot of the legwork out of this. Export your GA4 transactions alongside your platform's order report and ask an AI assistant to flag duplicate transaction IDs, missing orders or days where the two sources drift apart.

Strip out customer names and contact details before you upload anything, and treat what comes back as a lead to check rather than a finished answer.

During the event, keep a simple log of when promotions launched, emails went out and any issues occurred. That log becomes the starting point for next year's review.