How to prepare your online store for Black Friday and Cyber Monday

Most of what goes wrong on Black Friday can be spotted weeks before it happens. Here's what to check, week by week, so you spend the sale selling instead of fixing things.

A slow product page, an oversold item, or a delivery date you can't keep will each cost you sales on a normal day. During Black Friday and Cyber Monday, they tend to hit at the same time, while traffic, stock, checkout, shipping, and support are all under pressure at once.

Black Friday preparation can't wait until sale week. In Attentive's July 2026 survey of 600 US BFCM shoppers, 71% planned to start buying before Black Friday, and 46% planned to start before November. The weeks before the weekend count as part of the sale.

By the end, you'll have a week-by-week plan your team can run, including who can pause a campaign when something breaks. That leaves a lot less to figure out once the orders start coming in.

Set goals and a plan (6–8 weeks out)

Black Friday planning goes better when it starts from your own numbers. Pull last year's sale-period results first:

• Revenue, orders, conversion rate, and average order value
• The hours when traffic peaked
• The products that sold through fastest
• The number of support tickets that came in

That's your baseline. Skip the guesswork about what this year might look like.

Set a target for each number, and for whatever limits it, such as units on hand and how many orders your team can pack in a day. A revenue goal your stock or warehouse can't support will fall short however good the campaign is, so check each target against capacity before you commit.

Keep the targets modest enough to hit. Nobody doubles sales overnight, and a team with an unrealistic number often reaches for deeper discounts as soon as the first day misses.

Agree now on what you'll change if the early numbers fall short, such as a new offer or a lower free-shipping threshold, and who makes that call.

If you're reading this with fewer than six weeks to go, start with the four-week block in the checklist below and work forward.

Make sure your site can handle the traffic

Load test with the traffic you'll really get. Plenty of visitors browse, add something to the cart, and leave, so a test that only simulates orders misses most of the load. Include heavy product-page and search traffic, plus a smaller group checking out at the same time.

Timing matters too. Across Maropost merchants over the 2025 BFCM weekend, orders started to climb around 8 a.m., peaked between 11 a.m. and 2 p.m., and tapered off after 6 p.m. Cyber Monday held later in the day than Black Friday did. Your own peak may look different, so check when your traffic and orders climbed last year and run your test around those hours.

Before the sale starts, work through these:

• Check mobile speed. Use a real phone over a mobile connection. Large unoptimized images and third-party scripts for chat, reviews, and tracking are the usual culprits.
• Clear out unused apps and scripts. Remove anything you no longer use, then freeze new installs and site changes once testing is done.
• Build a holding page. Tell shoppers what's happening and when to check back, so a crash doesn't leave them guessing.
• Keep an incident contact list. Include your host, your payment provider, your theme developer, and whoever manages your DNS, with an after-hours number for each. Call the numbers before November 27 to make sure someone answers.

For more on the infrastructure side, see our posts on scaling for BFCM surges and Merchandising Cloud site speed.

Set up inventory for peak season

Start with a forecast for your hero products, the handful of items that will carry most of the sale. Last year's sell-through is your best starting point. Adjust it for this year's offers and for early signals such as waitlist sign-ups and saved items.

Supplier lead times are often longer than the sale itself, so you can't count on restocking mid-weekend. Hold enough safety stock on your hero products to get through peak season, and set reorder points based on how fast an item can sell down on its busiest day.

Decide now what happens when an item goes out of stock. You have three options:

• Hide it. The product disappears from the store until it's back, so no shopper hits a dead end.
• Keep it live and take back-orders. Give an honest ship date. This works best on items you'll restock within days.
• Suggest close alternatives. Point shoppers to similar products on the page they landed on.

Merchandising Cloud can control whether sold-out products stay visible in search and autocomplete, and it reorders category pages on live inventory so sold-out items stop leading the page.

Overselling is a different problem from running low. Commerce Cloud reserves stock at checkout and releases it if a payment fails or times out, so two shoppers can't buy the last unit. Any other channel that sells from the same stock needs to read the same count.

For more on what empty shelves cost you, read Stockouts are silent profit killers, and see how purchase orders and inventory work in Maropost.

Plan promotions that protect your margin

You can win the sale without your deepest discount. When Attentive asked US BFCM shoppers in July 2026 for the smallest discount that would get them to buy something they wanted, four in five said 40% off or less, and only 21% needed more than that. For many shoppers, the discount is reassurance that they aren't paying full price. That gives you room for eCommerce promotions that raise the size of the order instead of cutting the price on every item.

Here are the structures worth considering:

• Bundles. Group items that sell together and price the set below the combined list price. Bundle pricing lets you choose which items move together, and product bundles lift the order total without a deep discount on each item.
• Tiered offers. Spend more, save more. Set the first tier a little above your average order value, so shoppers have a reason to add one more item.
• Free-shipping thresholds. Free shipping was the strongest non-discount motivator among US BFCM shoppers, named by 68%. Set the threshold where it nudges a typical cart upward.
• Gift with purchase. A free item often costs you less than the same value taken off the price.
• Early access for VIPs. Give your best customers the offer before it goes public.
• Limits on stacking. Decide before the sale which offers can combine, which products are excluded, and the lowest price you'll sell at. Maropost applies one discount code per order, so plan any second offer around that.

In Maropost promotions, you can set a free-shipping threshold, offer an amount or percent off the order or selected products, and run multibuy offers such as buy two, get one discounted. Each can be scheduled, limited to a customer group, and capped on usage.

Once the offers are set, promote Black Friday and Cyber Monday deals by email and SMS before the weekend.

Make checkout fast and simple

Checkout is where everything above turns into orders, so give it a full test before the sale. These are the things to get right:

• Offer guest checkout. Creating an account adds a step right before payment, so letting first-time buyers pay without one removes friction.
• Add express wallets. Options such as Apple Pay and PayPal let shoppers on phones pay in a couple of taps.
• Show delivery costs and arrival dates before payment. Put estimated arrival dates on product and cart pages, show delivery and pickup options before the payment step, and publish your order cutoffs by location. A surprise delivery charge or a late date on the last step can cost you the order.
• Offer buy now, pay later. It can lift cart size. Manchester Collection added Afterpay through Neto by Maropost, and its average order value rose 10%.

Test every payment method end to end:

1. Place real orders with each card type, wallet, and buy now, pay later provider.
2. Try each one on iOS and Android, with and without a discount code or gift card.
3. Confirm that order emails send and that tax and shipping calculate correctly.
4. Refund the test orders afterward.

Our guide to how to boost checkout conversion rate goes deeper on the flow itself.

Shipping, click-and-collect, and delivery cutoffs

Call your carriers now to confirm capacity for November and December, and ask which surcharges apply. Major US carriers typically add peak-season surcharges during the holiday season.

The amounts depend on the carrier, service, package size, and zone. Work from your carrier's published schedule, and build the surcharge into your pricing before the first peak-season invoice arrives.

Carriers publish their holiday last-ship dates closer to the season, and the dates change from year to year, so ask for the current ones instead of reusing last year's. Once you have them, work out your cutoff:

1. Take your carrier's last-ship date.
2. Subtract your own handling time: pick, pack, and handover.
3. Publish the result as your cutoff on product pages, in the cart, and at checkout.

Decide ahead of time who's allowed to change a published cutoff once the season starts, and write the cutoff messaging early so only the dates need updating. You can set shipping rates and zones in Maropost shipping.

If you have physical stores, add buy online pick up in store (BOPIS) as a delivery option. It also gives shoppers who miss your shipping cutoff another way to get their order in time. Salesforce's 2025 holiday data showed that about 20% of global holiday orders were bought online and picked up in store, and stores absorb a large share of last-minute demand.

Your online and in-store inventory needs to read from the same count. Our post on pickup as a marketing channel explains why it matters beyond fulfillment.

Sell on marketplaces without overselling

Every marketplace listing sells from the same stock as your store, so a sale on any channel has to reduce the count on all of them. When updates lag, the last unit sells twice, and the cancellation costs more than the sale was worth.

A few habits keep that from happening:

• Sync stock and prices. Keep both in line between your store and each marketplace.
• Reconcile at fixed times. Check the counts during peak season, such as before the morning ramp.
• Hold back a buffer. On hero products, keep some stock out of marketplace listings so a spike on one channel doesn't empty the others.

The same goes for product data. When titles and prices differ by channel, someone has to fix them by hand, and that work piles up in the busiest week of the year. Tom Lacey, general manager at Altapac, says that after the company moved to one set of product data across its Maropost systems, "Managing product data used to take days. Now it takes minutes."

For more on selling across channels, see Marketplaces.

Customer service and returns policy

Your support team will answer the same questions all weekend: where an order is and whether it will arrive by Christmas. Get them ready before the sale starts:

• Brief the team. Share the offers, delivery cutoffs, and returns policy, with the same dates you show on the site.
• Add chat or a chatbot. Use it for order-status and policy questions.
• Set a response-time target. Pick one the team can meet on your busiest day.

Publish your holiday returns policy before the sale and show it on the product page as well as at checkout. The policy is only part of it.

In NRF and Happy Returns' 2025 Retail Returns Landscape, 71% of consumers said they're less likely to shop with a retailer again after a poor returns experience, and 76% said they're more likely to choose a return option that provides an instant refund or exchange. So make the process itself easy: let customers start a return in any channel, including in store, and keep refund status visible once they have.

State the return window, who pays for return shipping, and how long refunds take. If holiday purchases get a longer window than usual, say so, since someone buying a gift in November needs to know it will still be open in January.

Have a plan B

Something will go wrong during the sale: a payment provider has an outage, a hero product sells out within the hour, a carrier misses a pickup, or a discount applies in a way you didn't plan. Decide the response before it happens.

Keep these ready:

• A static holding page and a fallback payment method. Pre-write the customer messages for each situation.
• Cross-sells for sell-outs. Set up close alternatives so shoppers land on something they can buy.
• Metrics with thresholds. Watch checkout errors, payment failures, views of sold-out products, and delivery exceptions, and set the level at which each one triggers action. In peak season, the longer a problem goes unnoticed, the more orders it costs.

Name an owner for each call in advance: who pauses a campaign, who moves stock, who changes a delivery promise, who tells customers, and who runs the command center for the weekend.

Black Friday checklist for your store, week by week

Use this BFCM checklist to turn the sections above into a schedule for your holiday eCommerce season. If you're reading this closer to the sale, start with the block that matches your timeline and work forward.

6 weeks out

Six weeks before the sale:

• Pull last year's revenue, orders, conversion rate, average order value, and sell-through by SKU, and set targets from them.
• Choose your hero products and forecast demand for each.
• Ask your carriers about capacity and peak-season surcharges for November and December.

4 weeks out

Four weeks before the sale:

• Load test the site, check mobile page speed, and remove unused apps and scripts.
• Set safety stock and reorder points, and decide what happens when an item sells out.
• Finalize promotions, stacking rules, and VIP early access.

2 weeks out

Two weeks before the sale:

• Test every payment method, shipping option, and discount code from order to confirmation email.
• Publish delivery times, carrier-based cutoffs, and the holiday returns policy on product pages.
• Brief support, set up chat or chatbot answers, and share the incident contact list.

Peak week

During peak week:

• Watch the Plan B metrics, and act on any that cross their thresholds.
• Reconcile marketplace and store stock at fixed times each day.
• Keep every delivery promise in line with live stock and carrier capacity.

After Cyber Monday

After Cyber Monday:

• Check that orders from the final days of the sale are on track to arrive by the dates you promised.
• Record what broke during the sale and fix it before the next peak.

Run your store and your campaigns on Maropost

Your store is easier to manage when campaigns work from the same data. Maropost runs both on one system, with Commerce Cloud for the storefront and the Maropost email and SMS marketing platform (Marketing Cloud) for the campaigns sending shoppers to it.

Commerce Cloud

Commerce Cloud runs your store from one back office:

• Multi-location inventory with reservations
• Checkout Builder with express wallets (Apple Pay, Google Pay, and PayPal), buy now, pay later, and single-step checkout
• Promotions with free-shipping thresholds, amount or percent off, and multibuy offers
• Shipping zones by country, state, or ZIP, and a ShipStation connection
• Order tracking through pick, pack, and ship

Marketing Cloud

Marketing Cloud sends email and SMS campaigns from the same data as your store:

• Journeys triggered by a browse, a purchase, or a lapse
• Segments that update as behavior changes, not rebuilt for every campaign
• One customer profile for targeting, suppression, and campaign history

In a demo, a Maropost specialist can walk through your store and campaign setup and show how Commerce Cloud and Marketing Cloud would cover the checklist above.