The worst time to discover a checkout bug is the morning your best campaign goes live. Black Friday compresses a month of trading into a weekend, so every weakness gets found at once. The good news: the preparation is short, and mid-October is exactly when it should happen.
What Black Friday actually breaks
Rarely the shop itself. Usually it is the edges: a payment provider timing out, stock counts drifting, a courier integration that silently stops, or an email queue that backs up until confirmations arrive on Sunday. Consequently the useful work is not “make the site faster”. It is rehearsing the whole order journey while there is still time to fix what you find.
A five-week countdown
- Five weeks out. Place a real order yourself, on a phone, and refund it. Note everything awkward.
- Four weeks out. Check stock accuracy and decide what happens when something sells out mid-basket.
- Three weeks out. Confirm your host can take the load, and ask what your plan actually allows.
- Two weeks out. Freeze plugin and theme changes. Nothing new goes live after this point.
- One week out. Write the “something is wrong” plan: who to call, what to switch off, what to tell customers.
The details Greek shops trip over
Delivery promises cause more complaints than prices. State a realistic dispatch date on the product page, not only at checkout, and say what happens for the islands. In addition, make your returns window visible before the basket, because a discount plus an unclear return policy reads as risk. Our guide to choosing between WooCommerce and Shopify covers the platform side, and Google’s documentation on product structured data shows how to publish price and availability in a form that machines read correctly.
After the weekend
Write down what broke while it still stings, then fix it in December rather than next November. Also look at which discount actually earned money once returns settled. Plenty of shops discover that the busiest day was not the most profitable one. Keep an eye on speed throughout, since the traffic peak is exactly when Core Web Vitals stop being theoretical.
