Black Friday Cyber Monday arrives in a few days and even the most seasoned e-commerce teams are starting to feel the pressure. You’ve crafted the offers. You’ve built the campaigns. And now for marketers, this is when months of planning come into focus but also where small, easily overlooked details can impact even the strongest campaigns.
When BFCM sales start, the margin for error becomes smaller than ever. Website traffic starts to spike and customers expect a seamless experience from the moment they land on your page to the second they receive their confirmation email.
That’s why we’ve pulled together a quick checklist to help you maximise performance and protect your revenue. Make sure users don’t just click your ads, but actually add to their basket, and check out.
Run a load test to make sure your hosting plan can scale under increased demand. A good starting point is to review your BFCM site visitor data from the year before to make an estimate of the maximum traffic load you can expect.
You can then recreate this by using website load testing tools to simulate high traffic or alternatively, ask your hosting provider to do it for you and report back. If you have the technical resources internally, this can also be done with tools like K6 or JMeter to monitor server response times, page loading times, etc.
Why load testing your site matters: Even a short outage or slow page load can impact your conversion rate and impact customer acquisition costs. It’s important to make sure that your site can cope with increased traffic during one of the biggest online shopping events of the year. Another quick win - you can also test your site speed with Page Speed Insights or GTMetrix.
Make sure to test every code across multiple cart setups, including tiered deals or bundles. Doing a discount code audit is an important but often overlooked step when preparing for the intense Black Friday/Cyber Monday (BFCM) shopping season.
A quick check helps to prevent stacking discounts that can eat into your profit margins or outdated codes that don’t work leading to buyer frustration. By verifying the codes work as intended, you guarantee smooth customer transactions, minimize customer service issues, and confirm that your discounted sales deliver the maximum intended revenue.
Why running a discount code audit matters: A broken code can lead to user frustration, customer complaints or result in profit-draining discounts that were never intended.
Since the majority of traffic and sales happen on mobiles, either on web or in-app, during BFCM, any friction due to clunky layouts, confusing forms, or broken discount codes can quickly impact your ad clicks into costly cart abandonments. By quickly user testing the mobile check purchase journey, you ensure every pound spent on marketing is protected, preventing technical errors from killing your conversions and guaranteeing that your smooth process efficiently translates massive BFCM traffic into maximum profit.
Why it matters: Most abandoned baskets during peak season collapse at checkout. Wallet-based payments like Apple Pay, Google Pay and Shop Pay options should be visible and fully functional.
Make sure to review your BFCM automated flows such as abandoned cart, browse abandonment, order confirmations, and post-purchase emails to make sure they align with your planned BFCM messaging.
Testing your cart abandonment and after sales flows are essential because these automations are the safety nets for your highest-volume sales period. Cart abandonment flow is an opportunity to recover revenue from shoppers who hesitated at the finish line. While your post purchase flows like confirmation, tracking, and review requests can transform a one-time BFCM shopper into a potential long-term customer. Testing these flows will help to check that your recovery emails are delivered correctly and have the right messaging.
Why it matters: Automated flows are one of your most powerful revenue recovery tools. Testing these flows will help to check that your recovery emails are delivered correctly and have the right messaging.
Of course discounts and eye-catching campaigns matter, but they only work when the experience behind them is built to hold up under pressure. These checks help ensure your store is fast, functional, and customer-ready before the biggest e-commerce moment of the year.