Black Friday and Cyber Monday (BFCM) is the busiest, most concentrated selling window of the year. For a lot of small stores it can account for a fortnight's worth of revenue in a single weekend. But the traffic doesn't care whether you're ready. A slow checkout, a sold-out best-seller, or an email that goes out an hour late can quietly cost you thousands — and none of it shows up until it's too late to fix.
The good news is that a successful Black Friday is almost entirely a preparation problem, not a luck problem. The stores that clean up are rarely the ones with the deepest discounts; they're the ones that planned the promotion, stocked the right products, tested the checkout, and warmed up their audience weeks in advance. This checklist walks through exactly what to do and when, starting a month out and finishing on the day itself.
Four weeks before: strategy and stock
Everything downstream depends on decisions you make now, so don't leave the big questions until November.
Decide your offer, not just your discount. "20% off everything" is easy but forgettable. Consider a hero deal on one flagship product, tiered spend thresholds (spend £50 get X), or bundles that lift average order value. Our guide to discount strategies that actually work covers how to protect margin while still looking generous.
Forecast stock for your best-sellers. Pull last year's numbers if you have them, then order early — suppliers and couriers get slammer in November too. Running out of a hero product mid-weekend is the single most expensive mistake you can make. If you're not confident in your numbers, our inventory management basics will help you set safe reorder points.
Set up your discount codes and rules in advance. Create them now, set the start and end times, and confirm exclusions (gift cards, already-reduced lines). Test that each one applies correctly at checkout with a real order.
Plan your email sequence. At minimum you want an early-access or teaser email, a launch announcement, a mid-sale reminder, and a "last chance / ends tonight" message. Building the list of people who'll receive them is a job for now, not the day before — see our email marketing guide for sequence templates.
Two weeks before: build and test
With the strategy locked, this fortnight is about making the store itself ready to convert and to cope.
Build a dedicated sale page or banner. Shoppers arriving from an email or ad should land somewhere that instantly confirms the deal is real. If you're on Dirora, the Visual Theme Editor lets you drag in a countdown banner and a sale collection with live preview, so you can see exactly what customers will — no code required.
Check your site speed. Conversion falls sharply as pages slow down, and BFCM traffic spikes make slow sites slower. Compress and right-size your images (Dirora handles image optimisation automatically), trim anything non-essential, and read our store performance guide for the highest-impact fixes.
Confirm your shipping and cut-off dates. Decide your last-order-for-Christmas dates, your carriers, and your rates, and display them clearly. Under-promising and over-delivering on dispatch beats the reverse every time — our shipping strategy guide covers how to set expectations that protect you.
Test the full checkout, end to end. Place a real order on desktop and mobile. Confirm cards, and your wallet options like Apple Pay and Google Pay, all complete cleanly, that the right confirmation email fires, and that any BNPL option such as Klarna or Clearpay is switched on if you want it. A checkout that fails on mobile during your busiest hour is a silent revenue leak.
Schedule your social posts. Draft and queue your announcement, countdown, and live-day posts now so you're not writing copy while orders are flooding in. Our social media strategy guide has a posting cadence that works for sale events.
One week before: rehearse and brief
By now everything should exist. This week is about pressure-testing it and making sure the people involved know the plan.
Do a final inventory count. Reconcile what your system says against what's actually on the shelf, and hide or clearly flag anything you can't fulfil. Nothing sours a first-time BFCM customer faster than a cancellation email.
Warm up your audience. Send an early-access or teaser email to your best customers and loyalty members. Giving your list a head start rewards loyalty and smooths the traffic peak. If you run a referral or rewards scheme, this is the moment to activate it.
Prepare customer-service templates. Write saved replies for the questions you know are coming: delivery times, discount-code problems, returns, stock queries. Fast, consistent answers during a rush protect both sales and your reputation.
Brief everyone involved. Make sure anyone helping — packing, support, social — knows the offer, the exclusions, the cut-off dates, and who to escalate to if something breaks. A one-page cheat sheet beats a dozen frantic messages on the day.
Have a contingency plan for hero items. Decide in advance what happens when a headline product sells out: switch to a waitlist, promote a comparable alternative, or offer a back-order with an honest dispatch date.
On the day: monitor, respond, adapt
If you've done the work above, the day itself should be about steering rather than firefighting.
Watch your analytics in real time. Keep your analytics dashboard open and watch live traffic, conversion rate, and which products are moving. If a promoted product isn't converting, you can react — swap the banner, adjust the featured collection, or push a different deal.
Reply to enquiries fast. A quick answer to a pre-purchase question often is the sale. Lean on your prepared templates so speed doesn't cost you accuracy.
Recover abandoned carts. On a high-traffic day, even a small lift in recovered carts is real money. Make sure your abandoned-cart recovery emails are switched on and timed sensibly.
Post live updates. Share stock-running-low nudges, countdowns to the end of the sale, and any restocks. Urgency that's genuine converts; manufactured urgency erodes trust.
Keep dispatch moving. Orders that ship promptly turn one-time bargain hunters into repeat customers. The post-sale experience is where BFCM either builds your brand or just empties your stockroom.
After the weekend: turn buyers into customers
Black Friday's real payoff isn't the weekend's revenue — it's the flood of new customers you can keep. Send a thank-you and a well-timed follow-up, invite buyers to your newsletter or loyalty programme, and review what actually sold so next year's plan starts from data instead of guesswork. A one-off discount hunter is worth little; a repeat customer acquired during BFCM is worth a great deal.
A note on costs and margins
Discount-heavy weekends compress your margins, so every avoidable fee matters. Dirora charges no transaction fees on any plan — the only cut is a small platform fee that falls as you grow, from 1.5% on the free Starter plan to 0.75% on Pro, 0.25% on Business, and 0% on Enterprise. Card payments run through Stripe at standard rates with no markup. When you're already giving up margin to the discount, it helps not to give more away to your platform. You can see the full breakdown on our pricing page, or compare the true cost of platforms before you commit.
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When should I start preparing for Black Friday?
Ideally about four weeks out. That gives you time to lock in your offer, order stock for your best-sellers before suppliers and couriers get overwhelmed, build and test your sale pages, and warm up your email list. Leaving it to the final week usually means rushed decisions and untested checkouts.
How much should I discount on Black Friday?
There's no single right number — it depends on your margins. Rather than blanket-discounting everything, many stores do better with a headline deal on one hero product, tiered spend thresholds, or bundles that lift average order value while protecting overall margin.
How do I stop my store crashing under Black Friday traffic?
Optimise before the rush: compress and right-size images, remove non-essential scripts, and test the full checkout on both desktop and mobile. On Dirora, server-side rendering, automatic image optimisation, and a high-performance backend handle traffic spikes for you, but you should still test your own theme and third-party additions.
Does Dirora charge extra transaction fees during sales?
No. Dirora charges no transaction fees on any plan. The only cut is a small platform fee that falls as you grow — 1.5% on Starter down to 0% on Enterprise — and card payments run through Stripe at standard rates with no markup, whatever the sale volume.