Black Friday and the run-up to Christmas are among the busiest periods of the year for many online stores. It’s not just website traffic and order volumes that increase – your website, warehouse, customer service team and delivery partners all come under additional pressure.
That’s why seasonal preparation shouldn’t be limited to promotional offers and advertising campaigns. Even a well-planned campaign won’t help if a customer lands on a slow product page, can’t apply a discount or only finds out after placing an order that it won’t arrive before Christmas.
In its 2026 Black Friday preparation guide, Shopify also highlights areas beyond marketing, including store performance, checkout, order fulfilment and customer retention after the campaign.
So, what should you check before the busiest sales period of the year begins?
1. Check your most important pages on mobile
Start with the pages you expect to send the most campaign traffic to. This won’t necessarily be your homepage – individual product pages, collections and campaign landing pages are often more important.
Open them on your phone and check whether they load quickly, product variants are easy to select, the purchase button is easy to find and nothing gets in the way of browsing.
For a technical overview, you can use Google PageSpeed Insights and Core Web Vitals. If your store runs on Shopify, you can also use its Web Performance reports. These provide insight into loading speed, interactivity and visual stability, and can help you understand whether theme, app or code changes have affected store performance.
Technical metrics alone aren’t enough, though. Before the campaign starts, go through the entire purchase journey yourself on a mobile device – from the advertised product page to the cart and checkout. This often reveals issues that performance scores alone won’t show.
2. Test your promotions and discounts in advance
If you’re planning several promotions at the same time, it isn’t enough to check whether each one works individually – you also need to test how they behave together in real purchase scenarios. Check whether discounts are applied to the correct products, whether they can be combined with other discount codes, how discounts affect free-shipping thresholds and whether the final amount shown in the cart is always correct.
Shopify allows different types of discounts to be combined, but the combinations available depend on the discount type and your store settings. One area that deserves particular attention is how discounts affect your free-shipping threshold.
For example, if you offer free shipping on orders over €50 and a customer adds €55 worth of products to their cart but receives a €10 discount, the final cart value becomes €45. In that case, the order would no longer qualify for free shipping. You can read more about this in Shopify’s free-shipping discount documentation.
Before launching the campaign, also check the start and end times of your promotions, which products they apply to and any exclusions you have set.
3. Review the inventory of the products you plan to promote
If most of your advertising budget will be focused on a small number of products, their stock levels deserve particularly close attention. Don’t look only at the total inventory for each product. Check the availability of the most popular variants too – sizes, colours, configurations or other options. A product may still appear to be in stock even though its most popular variant is almost sold out.
When planning inventory, use sales data from previous periods to understand which products performed best during promotions, which variants sold out first and which items take longer to restock. This can help you estimate where you may need additional inventory during the season.
It’s also worth deciding in advance what you’ll do if the main product in your campaign does sell out. You might redirect advertising to a similar product, another variant or a prepared alternative offer. Having that plan ready before the campaign begins means you won’t need to make rushed decisions while your ads are already running.
4. Complete a test purchase from start to finish
Before the sales peak, check more than just your product pages. Test the entire ordering process – from adding a product to the cart through to receiving the order confirmation.
Place a test order and make sure the correct price appears in the cart, planned discounts are applied, your main payment methods work, delivery charges are calculated correctly, inventory is updated after the purchase and the customer receives the correct order confirmation email.
Shopify recommends placing test orders not only when setting up a store, but also after significant changes to payment or shipping settings. A test order allows you to check checkout, order processing, inventory, delivery, taxes and automated emails in one go.
If you use several payment providers or offer multiple payment methods, test at least the main options your customers are most likely to use.
5. Set realistic delivery expectations
Black Friday and the Christmas period don’t just bring more sales – warehouses, couriers and customer service teams all face additional pressure. Before your campaigns begin, realistically assess how many orders you can prepare each day and whether higher order volumes are likely to affect your usual delivery times.
If you normally deliver within 1–2 working days but expect this to increase to 3–5 days during the busiest period, update that information on your website in advance. In Shopify, you can set order processing times and, depending on your store configuration, display estimated delivery dates to customers during checkout.
However, we also recommend communicating longer delivery times earlier in the purchase journey – for example, in an announcement bar at the top of the website or directly on product pages. This means customers know about potential delays before they even add a product to their cart.
As Christmas approaches, clearly communicate the final order date for which you can realistically guarantee delivery before the holidays. Any promise to deliver by Christmas should be based on the actual capacity of your warehouse and delivery partners rather than a best-case scenario.
6. Prepare your post-purchase communication
The customer experience doesn’t end when someone clicks “Pay”. Before the seasonal rush, review your automated order confirmation, dispatch and delivery emails. Make sure customers can easily find the most important information about their order status, delivery and who to contact if they have a question.
If order preparation is likely to take longer than usual during the busiest period, communicate this in advance. Setting clear expectations helps reduce disappointment and can also lower the number of “Where is my order?” enquiries your customer service team receives.
It’s also worth reviewing your returns information. During the Christmas period, many products are purchased as gifts, so customers should be able to understand easily which return conditions apply and how long they have to return an item.
7. Check your analytics before launching campaigns
During your busiest sales period, you should be analysing results and responding quickly – not trying to work out why your data is being collected incorrectly. Before the campaign starts, check whether the main e-commerce events are being tracked correctly, including product views, add-to-cart events, checkout starts and purchases.
If you use Google Ads, Meta or other advertising channels, make sure purchase conversions are being passed correctly, their values match your actual orders and the same purchases are not being recorded more than once.
It’s also worth deciding in advance which metrics you’ll monitor during the campaign. Sales volume alone doesn’t tell the full story. Useful metrics include:
- conversion rate;
- average order value;
- revenue by channel;
- best-selling products;
- where customers are most likely to drop out of the purchase journey;
- return on advertising spend.
Reliable data will help you identify what is working, where problems are appearing and what you may need to adjust while the campaign is still running.
Seasonal preparation is about more than promotions and advertising
A successful Black Friday or Christmas campaign isn’t determined by the size of the discount or the advertising budget alone. The experience customers have once they arrive at your online store matters just as much.
Can they find the product they want quickly? Does the page work smoothly? Is the discount applied correctly? Is checkout easy? Do they know when their order will arrive?
That’s why, before the seasonal rush begins, it’s worth looking at your online store as one complete system – from the customer’s first visit through to the delivered order.
The more potential issues you identify and resolve before your campaigns begin, the fewer problems you’ll have to deal with when your store is under the greatest pressure of the year.
Frequently asked questions
What should you check before Black Friday and Christmas campaigns?
Before your main campaigns begin, check:
- website speed and the performance of your most important pages on mobile;
- the complete purchase and checkout journey;
- discount, promotional and free-shipping logic;
- inventory for promoted products and their variants;
- your main payment methods;
- order preparation and delivery times;
- your final order date if you promise delivery before Christmas;
- automated emails and returns information;
- analytics and advertising conversion tracking.
When should you start preparing for Black Friday?
The earlier you make major changes to your store, the more time you’ll have to test them properly. We don’t recommend changing your theme, installing several new apps or significantly restructuring checkout just a few days before Black Friday, as even a small change can unexpectedly affect another part of your store.
As the sales peak approaches, focus on stability: test your most important purchase scenarios, fix any issues you find and avoid major changes that could introduce new problems.
How can you check whether your online store is ready for increased traffic?
Start with your most important product, collection and campaign pages. Check their performance on mobile, go through the complete purchase journey through to payment and place a test order. If you use Shopify, also review your Web Performance reports and check whether recent changes to your theme, apps or code have negatively affected store performance.
What should you do if an advertised product sells out during the campaign?
It’s best to prepare for this scenario in advance. Identify alternative products or variants you can redirect advertising to and make sure customers can find them easily. This way, you won’t have to stop an entire campaign simply because one of your main products is no longer in stock.
