But the growing scale of the event is not only an opportunity, it’s also a major risk. Stores that fail to prepare for the surge in traffic put themselves at risk. That’s why Black Friday preparations in Norway begin long before November. In this article, our expert – Magda Piechówka, Fabres Team Lead, with over 10 years of experience at Komplett, one of Norway’s largest e-commerce players, will share how to prepare the technical side of online sales – to make sure your store doesn’t just survive the biggest shopping event of the year, but fully capitalizes on its potential.
Build a Scalable and Resilient Architecture
The foundation of successful Black Friday preparation lies in your store’s underlying architecture. Traditional monolithic structures often buckle under pressure as they force entire applications to scale together, regardless of which components actually need resources.
Adopt microservices for flexible scaling
Microservices architecture breaks your ecommerce platform into independent, specialized services focused on specific business functions like payment processing, product catalogs, or user authentication. This approach creates natural fault isolation boundaries, ensuring that if one service fails, it doesn’t bring down your entire store. Moreover, each service can be scaled independently based on demand – for instance, scaling only your product catalog service during promotional events while leaving other components unchanged.
Use asynchronous design and messaging queues
Asynchronous messaging enables your store to handle massive traffic surges by decoupling components that would otherwise overwhelm your system. Consider a checkout process: instead of completing all steps synchronously (payment verification, inventory updates, email confirmations), publish these tasks to a queue. This approach allows your checkout page to respond quickly while background processes handle the rest. Message queues like RabbitMQ, AWS SQS, or Azure Service Bus distribute load evenly during high traffic periods, preventing any single component from being overwhelmed.
Leverage cloud services like Azure for elasticity
Cloud platforms provide the elasticity essential for Black Friday’s unpredictable traffic patterns. Services like Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS), Servic Fabric or Docker orchestrate container-based applications at scale, enabling efficient deployment and management of your microservices. Primarily, cloud-native solutions allow you to automatically scale resources where needed without maintaining excess capacity year-round. In essence, this approach ensures your architecture can expand rapidly to meet Black Friday demand, ultimately optimizing both performance and cost.
Plan and Test Your Campaigns Early
Starting your Black Friday campaigns early gives you a critical advantage in a highly competitive shopping season. Successful merchants begin preparing at least 2 months in advance to maximize results. Brands that start planning in September consistently outperform those beginning in October, giving you time to avoid supply chain issues and fine-tune your marketing strategy.
Coordinate with marketing teams for early validation
Early coordination between technical and marketing teams is essential for smooth campaign integration. Set clear goals for sales, average order value, and customer acquisition costs across all channels. Many retailers start “leaking deals” through advertising in late October and early November, subsequently nurturing customers through email and social media. This strategy, often called “Black November,” allows you to test which creative assets perform best before ramping up spending during the four-day shopping weekend.
Test campaigns in staging environments
Always test your campaigns in staging environments first. Additionally, this practice helps identify potential issues without affecting your live store. As one technical expert notes, “If production breaks, you want that to happen beforehand, not during Black Friday”. Use a staging site for initial implementation and testing, then document testing results clearly to communicate any bugs to your development team.
Ensure compatibility with store infrastructure
Your campaigns must align with your store’s technical capabilities. Specifically, create a comprehensive plan covering:
- Website updates and checkout optimization
- Inventory and stock checks
- Email, SMS, and ad campaign preparation
- Analytics setup for tracking performance
Test your server’s load capacity in advance using tools like loadimpact.com to simulate heavy traffic. Communicate with all relevant teams (search, hosting, dev ops, and developers) so everyone understands the campaign schedule and technical requirements. Furthermore, establish clear roles for code publishing and emergency response to ensure smooth operations during the peak shopping period.
Remember that Black Friday preparation involves both marketing creativity and technical readiness. Consequently, a well-tested, validated campaign running on robust infrastructure will maximize your holiday season success.
Run Performance and Load Testing
Performance testing is the backbone of successful Black Friday preparation. Website crashes cost enterprises over $3.3 million per hour, making thorough testing non-negotiable for your online store.
Use historical traffic data to simulate real scenarios
Begin by analyzing traffic patterns from previous Black Fridays. Initially, collect and study this data at least six months before the event. Take your historical peak traffic and double it in simulations to account for unexpected surges. Tools like Apache JMeter or Locust effectively create these real-world testing scenarios. This approach allows you to replay actual customer behavior rather than generating arbitrary traffic patterns that don’t reflect reality.
Calibrate user load to reflect peak demand
- Understanding different testing types is essential for proper calibration:
- Load testing: Evaluates how your platform handles consistent traffic over time, simulating steady seasonal patterns
- Stress testing: Pushes your system beyond expected capacity to identify breaking points – crucial for flash sales scenarios
- Remember that Black Friday typically brings 5-15 times normal traffic, with 70% concentrated in just four hours. Progressively increase the load during testing until website stability becomes compromised. This reveals your actual capacity limits.
Identify weak spots before Black Friday
After running tests, analyze results to pinpoint potential failure points. Notably, performance issues often stem from application bottlenecks rather than insufficient server resources. Pay particular attention to custom implementations, third-party integrations, and mobile performance. Database systems frequently become the weakest link when thousands of customers check the same popular items simultaneously.
Ultimately, test critical user journeys – especially checkout flows – under peak conditions to ensure they maintain performance standards throughout the shopping event.
Automate and Monitor Critical Flows
Automation serves as your safety net during Black Friday, preventing costly issues when shoppers flood your store. Mobile commerce now represents over 50% of e-commerce traffic, making rigorous testing essential across all customer touchpoints.
Set up automated tests for checkout and registration
Automated testing of checkout flows validates various payment methods, promo codes, and cart adjustments, reducing the risk of abandoned carts. E-commerce checkout abandonment rates average 70% across industries, often due to technical issues that comprehensive testing could prevent. To strengthen your black friday preparation:
- Verify payment reliability across credit cards, digital wallets, and alternative payment options
- Test both guest and registered user checkout scenarios
- Validate discount, shipping, and tax logic throughout the process
Use cross-device testing to ensure mobile readiness
Cross-device testing ensures your store performs flawlessly across a spectrum of devices and browsers. Given the 6.64 billion smartphones in use globally, testing on every device is impossible. Instead, prioritize:
- Testing on real devices where possible, supplemented by emulators/simulators
- Validating your site across different screen sizes and resolutions
- Using cloud-based device farms to access thousands of device-browser combinations
Monitor site speed using Lighthouse and DevTools
Lighthouse generates reports with insights into performance, accessibility, best practices, and SEO. Open the Lighthouse panel in Chrome DevTools to:
- Create a baseline to measure subsequent changes
- Identify specific opportunities for improvement
- Review quantitative measurements of site performance
Track real-time performance with monitoring tools
Set up monitoring dashboards to track errors, queues, and response times during the shopping event. Additionally, measure with PageSpeed Insights and GTmetrix to identify and address bottlenecks. Monitoring allows you to detect issues before they impact customers, ensuring your Black Friday prep maintains optimal performance throughout the peak shopping period.
Enable safer deployments with smaller code changes
Small, frequent code changes create a safer approach to Black Friday preparation than large, risky deployments. According to DORA studies, organizations implementing CI/CD practices experience a 50% reduction in change failure rate and gain a 50% boost in capacity for experimentation and innovation.
Traditionally, retailers implement code freezes weeks before Black Friday—some as early as August — allowing only “must-have priority #1 changes” afterward. Nevertheless, with proper safeguards, you can continue deploying improvements while minimizing risk:
- Feature flags – Deploy code without activating it immediately, then enable features with a simple toggle when ready. This approach decouples deployment from release, providing a kill switch for instantly disabling problematic functions without redeployment.
- Progressive exposure – Roll out changes to small user segments first, starting with internal teams before expanding to customers. This “canary deployment” approach identifies issues before they affect your entire user base.
- Runtime configuration – Change system settings dynamically without redeployments, allowing you to reroute orders to alternative logistics providers if needed.
Beyond deployments, automate key processes at each stage to reduce human error. This strategy allows you to maintain both stability and agility throughout peak season, establishing a foundation for your best Black Friday yet.
Conclusion
Preparing your online store for Black Friday requires significant planning and technical implementation. Above all, starting early gives you a competitive edge—ideally two months ahead to test campaigns, build resilient systems, and address potential weaknesses.
Performance testing stands as the cornerstone of your Black Friday preparation. Therefore, you should analyze historical data, simulate peak traffic scenarios, and identify bottlenecks before they affect real customers. Coupled with automated testing of critical flows like checkout and registration, these practices safeguard your revenue during the busiest shopping days.
Site speed and mobile responsiveness remain equally important considerations. After all, with over 50% of e-commerce traffic coming from mobile devices, cross-device testing ensures all customers enjoy seamless experiences regardless of how they shop. Additionally, tools like Lighthouse and PageSpeed Insights help you track and optimize performance in real-time.
The foundation of Black Friday success ultimately depends on your technical architecture. Microservices, asynchronous design, and cloud services provide the flexibility and scalability needed to handle massive traffic surges without crashing your systems. Similarly, implementing smaller code changes with feature flags and progressive exposure allows you to maintain development momentum while minimizing risks.
Black Friday 2025 presents a tremendous opportunity for e-commerce businesses. By following this comprehensive preparation strategy, you won’t just survive the shopping rush—you’ll maximize revenue, delight customers, and set yourself up for a successful holiday season. Start implementing these technical preparations today, and watch your online store thrive during retail’s biggest event of the year.
And… what now? Read our another article – about data science! What is it and why do you need it?
Want to discuss with our Strategic Partnership Manager about increasing your business?
