How to prepare your store for Black Friday in October
The slowest part of the preparation is stock, so that is where you start. Take the products you want to promote and compare the count in the panel with what is really on the shelf, separately for every size and colour that will appear in an ad. Count a delivery that has not arrived yet on its own. If the supplier has not confirmed a date, prepare a version of the offer without those products rather than building a campaign on the hope that the goods will make it.
Read last year’s data together with the dates of stock-outs. A product that stopped selling on the third day of the campaign may simply have run out in the warehouse, so low sales after the stock is gone say nothing about interest. If it is your first season, order cautiously and ask the supplier whether you can top up.
Then margin. From the price after discount subtract the cost of the goods and everything you add to each parcel, including the payment fee. Only what is left tells you whether the promotion makes sense, so write down right away the price you will not go below and the number of units set aside for the campaign.
November is the time for promotion rules
By about 19 November, write down the terms of the promotion in one document that says which products the campaign covers and whether the code combines with other discounts. From it you update the store pages and the support knowledge base, so that the customer and your team read the same version of the rules.
Test the code on two baskets. One meets the conditions and the other does not, and with the second the customer should see which condition is missing, because a bare “invalid code” leaves them with an unanswered question. If CartBot suggests a code in the conversation, it must be set up in the store, since a coupon card in the chat creates no promotion by itself.
Do not guess at the Christmas deadlines. Carriers announce their season schedules themselves, so check them for 2026 when they appear, and only then set your own cut-off date, counting where you ship to and how long it takes you to pack an order. Christmas Eve falls on Thursday 24 December and since 2025 it has been a statutory day off in Poland, so do not count it as a working day in the packing plan. If you extend gift returns, describe it as an extra promise by the store with a clear scope. The statutory 14 days to withdraw from the contract stay separate and run from the day the customer received the parcel.
If you run the store alone, tell customers the hours at which you check messages. Launch a new bot only after trials on your own catalogue, including a question with no answer and a handover to a person. The bot will not learn the new promotion rules until they reach its knowledge base.
The last week before Friday: the test purchase
Between 20 and 25 November, go through a purchase the way a customer will, meaning on a phone, in a fresh browser session, from the ad or promotion page all the way to the order confirmation. Do it once on a weaker connection. Write down every error together with the product and the conditions in which it appeared, because otherwise the person who has to fix it cannot reproduce it.
A declined payment is easy to skip. After an interrupted payment the customer should know whether the order exists and how to get back to it, and the email and the store cannot tell them two different things.
Finally the server. Clicking through one order checks that the store works, but says nothing about what happens under heavier traffic. Agree a test and an overload plan with whoever looks after your hosting, and while you are at it settle the on-call rota and who makes the decision in a difficult case when you are not there.
What to check the day before the promotion starts
On Thursday 26 November you invent nothing new. You only fix what breaks prices or payment, and you leave cosmetic changes until after the promotion. A bug you cannot fix in time gets switched off together with the faulty part of the campaign.
Add a failure plan written on paper or in your phone, because the store panel may be unresponsive at that moment. The contact for whoever looks after the store. Instructions for disabling a faulty code and returning to the previous settings. If something falls over, you tell customers only what you know for sure, so “we have a problem with payments, next update at 2 pm” is better than “everything is working normally” when you do not yet know whether it is. The checklist for that day is below, and after it, go to bed at a human hour.
- The promotion start time and the time zone in the store settings.
- The price on the product page and the amount in the cart at payment, checked on several variants and on a product excluded from the campaign.
- The code on a product in the campaign and on an excluded one.
- The code’s spending threshold and how it combines with another discount, and also the bot’s answer to whether codes stack, compared with the campaign terms.
- A test purchase to the very end, with the order status in the panel and the amount charged, also after an interrupted payment.
- The end of the campaign, including 30 November if it covers Cyber Monday.
Friday 27 November: on duty
On Friday you mainly watch payments and orders waiting to ship. If you cannot keep up with packing, correct the shipping time on the site for new purchases, and write separately to the people already waiting, because changing a banner does not change what they heard when they ordered. Decide in advance who pauses the ad for a product that has sold out, and whether that person has access to the settings they need. When a conversation passes from the bot to a person, the customer should hear the truth about when someone will reply.
Cyber Monday and Tuesday 1 December
Over the weekend, go through the questions that have come in since Friday. A payment problem you handle at once, and a question about dimensions means the product page is missing something. Before you put a weekend product on the banner again on Monday, check that the chosen variant is in stock and that you can still pack within the time stated on the site.
Monday’s offer does not have to repeat Friday’s. You can take different products or add something doable in season, for example free gift wrapping, but first count the materials and the time. With free delivery, put the shipping cost into the order calculation.
Watch the prices. A new promotion on Monday does not erase Friday’s price from the history. Take a product at PLN 200 that was PLN 160 on Friday and is PLN 170 on Monday. If there was no price lower than Friday’s in those 30 days, then for Monday’s cut the reference price you show is exactly PLN 160.
A reminder email about an abandoned cart starts with checking consents. Article 398 of the Polish Electronic Communications Law requires prior consent to such a commercial message, and an address typed into the cart does not replace it. CartBot does not send such emails. You set them up in your own mailing tool and switch them off there too when the discount ends.
On Tuesday 1 December, set the sales of promoted products against the costs of the campaign, meaning discounts and delivery subsidies, because turnover alone does not show what is left in the till. Then you switch the store to Christmas. Expired codes and banners go, and the home page gets an entry point to gifts with packing information. You enter delivery dates before Christmas Eve based on the carriers’ schedules and on how many parcels you can really pack, and the weekend questions nobody had an answer to go onto the list of site fixes.