E-commerce Preparation for Black Friday and Christmas

Stock planning means comparing last year's figures for the same period against this year's growth target, then placing supplier orders in good time. The ten bestsellers from last year's trading period get a higher safety stock than a normal month; a new product with no sales history gets a more conservative forecast.

A home textiles brand ran into a familiar problem last year: a fabric imported from overseas sat in customs for three weeks, leaving the shelf empty in the first week of November. Where supply comes from abroad, the order goes in by the end of September at the latest, with customs and shipping time built into that date; even a domestic supplier's lead times can stretch during peak trading, so confirmation is worth getting early.

Rather than pulling a low-stock product from the campaign entirely, showing a clear low-stock message on the page is the better route; it manages expectations and creates a natural sense of urgency at the same time.

This is answered with a measurement, not a guess. A load test ahead of the campaign shows how many concurrent visitors the site can carry without slowing down; last year's busiest hour is the baseline, and the test simulates double that figure.

In practice, the checklist is short but concrete: images served compressed and in a modern format (WebP/AVIF), third-party scripts (live chat, recommendation widgets, analytics tags) reviewed and trimmed where possible, and the checkout flow tested on an actual mobile device before the campaign starts.

• Load-test the homepage and top product pages
• Serve images in WebP/AVIF at the right size
• Test checkout on a real mobile device with a small live transaction
• Test stock indicators and cart warnings once before launch
• Give the hosting provider advance notice of the campaign dates

A campaign calendar means writing down, in advance, which product gets pushed on which channel in which week. Early access or a waitlist in the first week, the main discount window in weeks two and three, a Christmas-gift theme in the final week: an order like that keeps email, social and ad copy from repeating themselves.

A tea and coffee brand's mistake last year was pushing the same product range with the same discount for three weeks running; by week three, customers had stopped noticing the message. Giving each week a different product group, or a different angle (a gift set, a limited run, a final-day push), keeps the messaging feeling fresh.

Peak-season ad spend is not released on a single day; it goes out in staged waves. Google Merchant Center's holiday-season guidance describes exactly this approach: budget released gradually across the full six to seven weeks, and redistributed mid-week as stock levels shift.

In practice, that means accepting that cost per click runs higher than normal during peak trading, and sizing the budget for that rather than fighting it. Ad copy and creative tested at a low budget in the weeks before the campaign gets reused at a higher budget once the main window opens; the campaign's busiest week is not the moment to test something brand new.

The last order date for Christmas delivery is set with a day or two of buffer before the courier's own published cut-off. That date belongs on the site, on the cart page and in the order confirmation email; a customer should not have to guess whether a gift will arrive in time.

A toy brand's most common query during peak season is exactly that: when will my order arrive. If that information only lives in a tracking email rather than on the product page itself, customer service queries multiply; making it visible from the start cuts that load considerably.

Peak season means tracking questions, return requests and stock queries all rising at once. Draft replies for the common cases, a delivery delay, the returns process, a size or colour exchange, written and shared with the team before the campaign starts mean nobody is writing a reply from scratch during the busiest days.

Whether the standard returns window still applies during the campaign, or whether an extended returns period applies to Christmas gifts, is worth settling in advance and adding to the confirmation email itself, so the customer finds the answer without having to ask.