How do I prepare my store for black friday?

The offer decides everything downstream, so settle it early and in writing, with the arithmetic done.

Start with the floor. For each product, work out the contribution at the discount you are considering: price after discount, minus cost of goods, minus shipping if you are covering it, minus payment fees, minus an allowance for returns. Any product where that number goes negative should not be in the promotion, no matter how good it looks in an ad.

Then pick the shape of the offer. A single storewide percentage is simple to communicate and expensive on your best margins. Tiered discounts by spend protect the average order. Bundles and gift sets raise the order without cutting the unit price. A deep discount on a small number of products, with everything else at full price, pulls people in without discounting the catalogue.

Decide what happens to shipping, because that is often the more powerful lever. A threshold, free shipping on the promotion, or nothing at all. Whatever you choose, price it into the floor.

Set the dates and hold them. Extending a sale after it ends teaches customers to wait next year, and starting early after promising a date annoys the people who were waiting.

Write one page with the offer, the dates, the excluded products, the codes, the terms and the floor. Everyone from the person writing the emails to the person answering the phone works from that page. Most promotional chaos comes from a plan that lived in somebody's head.

The busiest week of the year is decided by what you can ship, not by what you can sell. Work out the limits and plan the demand to fit them.

Stock first. Order early for the products that will carry the promotion, and know your lead times. Then decide what happens when something sells out: does it come off the site, go to backorder with a stated date, or get replaced in the campaigns by something else. Decide now rather than at nine on a Friday night. Set up back in stock notifications so a sold out product still collects demand.

Dispatch capacity second. Work out how many parcels a day you can genuinely pack, then how many the promotion is likely to produce. If the second number is larger, either add capacity or shape the demand, by staggering the offer or by setting a realistic delivery promise. Book couriers and check their cut off dates for the period, since those move at this time of year.

Support third. Volume rises with orders and rises further with promotions, because discounts generate questions. Prepare answers in advance for the ones you know are coming: does the code work on sale items, when will it arrive, can I change my order, what if the price drops after I buy. Publish a price adjustment policy so the answer is consistent.

And tell customers the truth about delivery. An honest date beats an optimistic one, because a late parcel in December costs a review, a refund and a customer.

The stores that do well during the sale week did the work in the weeks before it. By the time the discount goes live, the audience should already exist.

Grow the list from early autumn. Signup offers, back in stock alerts, and a clear promise that subscribers hear first. That promise is worth more than a percentage, because it gives people a reason to join now rather than to wait for the sale anyway.

Build a waitlist specifically for the promotion. A page that says the sale is coming, with the dates and a signup, converts autumn traffic into an audience you can message for free on the day. It also gives your ads somewhere useful to send people before the offer exists.

Keep advertising through the quiet weeks rather than saving the budget. Audiences built in October are cheaper than audiences built in the sale week, when everyone is bidding for the same attention.

Segment before the week starts, not during it. Recent buyers, lapsed customers, subscribers who never bought, people who abandoned a cart, and buyers of the specific products in the promotion each need a different message. Build the segments and write the emails in advance.

Then plan the sending schedule day by day, including the reminder on the last day, which is usually the strongest single send. Load everything ahead of time so the week itself is monitoring rather than production.

And prepare the creative early, in every format you need, with the offer stated on the asset rather than only in the caption.

Everything that breaks under load breaks at the worst moment, so run these checks in advance and freeze changes before the week.

Speed first, on a mid range phone. The product page, the cart and each checkout step. Remove apps that are not earning their place, compress the images you will use in the campaigns, and check that any promotional banner or countdown does not push the buy button down the page.

Checkout second. Walk through it as a customer, with a real card, on a phone. Test the discount codes, including the ones that should fail on excluded products. Test wallet payments, which are the most common route on mobile and the most common place tracking breaks. Check that shipping options and thresholds behave as intended with a discount applied.

Tracking third. Confirm the purchase event fires once per order on every payment route, that the value matches your definition, and that consent handling works. Discount periods distort reporting badly if the value sent includes or excludes discounts inconsistently.

Feed and approvals fourth. Sale prices need to be in the product data as sale prices with the correct dates, and any change to prices or promotional content can trigger a review. Submit early, because approval queues are slower at this time of year and a disapproved product on the day is a lost day.

Then freeze. No theme changes, no new apps, no redesigns in the week before. The last thing to do is a full walkthrough on a phone, from a search to a delivered confirmation email, exactly as a customer would.