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.
Key takeaways
Black Friday planning goes better when it starts from your own numbers. Pull last year's sale-period results first:
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.
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:
For more on the infrastructure side, see our posts on scaling for BFCM surges and Merchandising Cloud site speed.
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:
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.
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:
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.
Checkout is where everything above turns into orders, so give it a full test before the sale. These are the things to get right:
Test every payment method end to end:
Our guide to how to boost checkout conversion rate goes deeper on the flow itself.
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:
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.
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:
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.
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:
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.
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:
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.
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.
Six weeks before the sale:
Four weeks before the sale:
Two weeks before the sale:
During peak week:
After Cyber Monday:
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 runs your store from one back office:
Marketing Cloud sends email and SMS campaigns from the same data as your store:
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.