Black Friday Is Live: What to Watch Today

Today Is Not a Building Day

Everything that could be prepared has been prepared. Today's job is narrow: keep the site working, keep customers informed, and resist the very strong urge to improve something while several hundred people are trying to give you money.

Here is what to watch, in what order, and what to do about it.

The Four Numbers

Refreshing your revenue figure every ninety seconds tells you nothing you can act on. These four do.

1. Checkout completion rate

The most important number today. Of the people who begin checkout, what proportion finish?

Compare it against a normal day. If it drops meaningfully, something is broken even though the site looks fine — a payment method failing, a validation error on a particular field, a shipping option not calculating, a discount code rejecting valid orders.

A falling completion rate with steady traffic is the clearest early warning you will get, and it is the one most people never look at.

2. Page response time

How long the server takes to respond, not how long the page takes to render.

Rising response times are the precursor to errors. If your product pages were responding in 400ms this morning and they are at 2.5s by lunchtime, you are approaching a limit and you have perhaps twenty minutes to act before it becomes a limit you have exceeded.

3. Error rate

Any 5xx errors are a hard failure and need immediate attention. A small number of 4xx errors is normal; a sudden spike usually means a link in an email or ad is pointing somewhere that does not exist.

4. Payment gateway status

Bookmark your provider's status page and check it before assuming a problem is yours. Payment providers do have incidents on Black Friday, and diagnosing your own site for forty minutes while the actual fault sits elsewhere is a bad use of the day.

The Timeline

Launch, whenever you said it would be

• Publish at the announced time. Not early, not late
• Click every link on the campaign page yourself, on a phone
• Place a real test order within the first ten minutes
• Check the confirmation email arrives
• Verify the discount code applies correctly to a real basket
• Check the offer displays properly on mobile

Those first ten minutes catch most launch-day faults, and they are far cheaper to catch then than at two in the afternoon.

Through the morning

Traffic typically builds from early morning, with a peak in the middle of the day and another in the evening. The pattern varies by sector — check last year's hourly data if you have it.

• Watch the four numbers roughly every half hour
• Keep support responses fast. Today, a quick reply converts hesitation into an order
• Update stock status promptly. Overselling on Black Friday generates a refund and a bad review
• Watch your ad spend against your stop-loss

Through the afternoon and evening

• The evening peak is real, particularly on mobile, and it is often when problems first appear
• If you have a same-day dispatch cut-off, say so clearly and count down to it
• Keep someone available late. Problems at 9pm on Black Friday are common and unattended

End of day

• Confirm all orders exported to fulfilment correctly
• Note anything that struggled — you have Cyber Monday on Monday
• Thank whoever worked

When Something Goes Wrong

First: work out what is actually broken

"The website's down" is usually one of several quite different things:

• Site not loading at all — hosting, DNS or CDN
• Site slow but working — capacity, database, or a third-party script
• Site fine but checkout failing — payment provider, a plugin conflict, or a validation error
• Site fine but orders not arriving — an integration or email problem, and the customer may not know

Each has a different fix, and treating them the same wastes the time you do not have.

Second: check whether it is you

Payment provider status page, hosting status page, CDN status page. A meaningful proportion of peak-day incidents originate somewhere other than your site, and knowing that changes both your response and what you tell customers.

Third: roll back rather than fix forward

If a change caused it — and it usually did — revert the change. Debugging live under peak load is how a ten-minute incident becomes a three-hour one.

This is why the code freeze matters. If nothing changed, there is nothing to roll back, and the cause is almost certainly capacity or a third party.

Fourth: communicate

If the site is struggling, say so. A branded holding page reading "we're busier than expected — back in a few minutes, your basket is safe" is enormously better than a raw error, and better than pretending nothing is happening.

Post on social. Reply to support. People are broadly forgiving of a site under load if they are told what is happening; they are not forgiving of silence.

Fifth: do not panic-discount

Increasing the offer to compensate for an outage is a reflex worth suppressing. It reduces your margin, confuses people who already bought at the earlier price, and does not fix the underlying problem.

If you genuinely disadvantaged customers, extend the offer by a few hours afterwards instead. Cleaner, cheaper and easier to explain.

What Not to Change Today

• Anything structural on the website
• Plugins, themes, integrations
• Prices, once published
• The end time of the offer
• Your delivery promises
• The campaign page layout

If you spot something imperfect — a typo, a slightly wrong image, an awkward line of copy — write it down and fix it on Sunday. Almost nothing you notice today is worth the risk of a deployment under load.

The single exception: something that is actively preventing purchase. Fix that, immediately, and only that.

Support Today

Speed matters more than polish. A customer asking "will this arrive before Christmas?" at 11am who gets an answer at 11:05 buys. The same customer answered on Saturday does not.

• Use your pre-written responses
• Be honest about delivery. Do not promise Christmas delivery you cannot meet — our guide to delivery promises covers why this costs more than a lost sale
• Watch for repeated questions. Three people asking the same thing means your page is unclear, and adding one line of text to the page is the fastest fix available today
• Be generous with goodwill gestures. A refunded delivery charge is cheaper than a public review

Tomorrow and Monday

Black Friday weekend continues to trade, and Saturday and Sunday are frequently under-resourced because everybody planned for Friday.

• Keep stock and hours updated
• Keep support staffed
• Monday is Cyber Monday, which behaves quite differently — more desktop, more digital, more service purchases. Our guide to Cyber Monday for service businesses covers it

Next Week

Write the retrospective while it is fresh. What broke, what was slow, what sold out, what customers kept asking, what you would do differently. That document is worth more than any amount of planning next October, and nobody ever writes it in December if they did not write it now.

Then switch messaging from discount to deadline. From 1 December, the thing that persuades people is not price — it is whether it arrives in time.

Our November marketing calendar covers the transition, and our pre-Black Friday stress test covers the preparation that got you here.

Good luck today. If you need a hand — now or before next year's — get in touch with Amigo Studios. We build and support e-commerce sites across Northern Ireland.