How to Prepare Your Store for Black Friday — a practical walkthrough. Tools mentioned are ones we track and compare; links go to our deeper coverage.
1. Week 8-6: decide the offer and protect the margin
Pick offers you can honour at volume: bundle value beats naked discounts. Model the margin at your best-case volume — a viral 40%-off you can't fulfil is a reputation debt.
2. Week 6-4: stress-test the machine
Load-test the site (speed fixes from our speed guide apply double here), confirm stock and supplier lead times, brief fulfilment, and pre-write support macros for the ten questions you know are coming.
3. Week 4-2: build the list, tease the drop
BFCM is won by the list you built in October. Capture aggressively, run a teaser flow in Klaviyo, segment early-access VIPs — inbox placement earned now pays on the day.
4. Week 2-0: creative volume and final checks
Paid channels get expensive; creative testing at volume (Creatify makes 20 variants affordable) finds the winner before CPMs peak. Freeze deploys the final week — nobody ships code on Black Friday eve.
5. The day and the day after
Monitor, don't tinker. Then the real trick: the post-purchase flow that converts one-time deal hunters into subscribers — that's where BFCM profit actually lives.
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