The mistakes that cost money on Black Friday were made in October. Here is the timeline we work to.
Eight weeks out — inventory and speed
Inventory commitments. Forecast per SKU, not in total. Running out of the hero product on the Friday morning is the most expensive outcome available, and having too much of the wrong SKU is the second.
Performance work. Now, not later. Audit the theme, cut the app scripts you are not using, compress the images. Traffic is going up several-fold and page speed falls under load.
Stress test. Shopify handles the checkout. Your theme, your apps and your third-party scripts are what fall over.
Six weeks out — the offer and the pages
Decide the offer properly. Sitewide percentage, tiered threshold, bundles, or gift-with-purchase — each has different margin and AOV consequences and you cannot evaluate them in November.
Build the landing pages now. One for the sale, one per major segment if you have them. Get them indexed early so the organic traffic has somewhere to land.
Four weeks out — the email and SMS plan
Written, built, tested, scheduled. The whole sequence: teaser, early access for the list, launch, mid-sale, last chance.
Warm the sending domain if volume is going to jump sharply. A sudden tenfold increase from a cold domain lands in spam.
Two weeks out — freeze
Code freeze two weeks out. No theme changes, no new apps, no integrations. Every outage we have seen during peak traded on a change made in the final fortnight, usually a well-intentioned one.
What still happens during the freeze: content, prices, inventory, scheduled campaigns. Nothing that touches code.
Also two weeks out: brief support, write the macros, decide who is on call and how they get reached.
The week itself
Watch three numbers: conversion rate, page speed, and failed payments. Each has a different cause and a different fix.
Have a rollback plan for the theme. Know how to revert in under five minutes, and test that you can.
The part most brands get wrong
The Black Friday cohort is the worst cohort you will acquire all year. Deepest discount, lowest intent, lowest repeat rate.
Plan the follow-up before the sale. A December post-purchase sequence that gets even a fraction of those buyers to a second order at full price is worth more than another point of discount.
Talk it through
Want the store checked before the freeze?
Speed, app bloat, checkout and the landing pages. Best done in October, still worth doing in early November.
Book a peak checkA real read within one business day — not a sales call.
About the author
Manpreet Singh
Founder of Proscube. Leads the studio's Shopify, headless and CRO engineering, and works directly with founders rather than through account managers.
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