Black Friday Morning Checks

Before the first email goes out

It is Black Friday morning. The sale is planned, the emails are scheduled, the banners are up, and the site has been left alone all week.

There is still an hour worth spending before it goes out, not on changes but on checks.

Some things were fine yesterday and are wrong today. Others were never tested the way a customer will use them.

Every problem found this morning is found by you. Every one missed is found by customers, usually several at once.

Six checks before the email

• A real order, placed with a real card.
• Every promotion code, typed exactly as the email prints it.
• Stock counts for the items in the sale.
• The site's speed, on a phone using mobile data.
• The phone and the inbox, with a person behind each.
• The banners and dates, including when the sale ends.

The first is the one that tests everything at once. A single real order runs through the product page, the cart, the code, the payment, the stock count and the emails, in the order a customer meets them.

A real card, a real order

Test modes and test card numbers check that the checkout pages work. They do not check the live connection to the payment processor, which is the part that matters today.

Buy something inexpensive with your own card, on a phone, shipped to yourself. Then check that the payment was taken, the confirmation email arrived and was not filed as spam, and the order appeared in the store's admin.

Check the tax and shipping on the receipt, and that the stock count went down by one. Then refund it; the small processing fee is the price of the test.

If the store offers a second way to pay, such as a wallet button or PayPal, test that too. It can fail on its own.

Every code, on a phone

Type each promotion code exactly as it appears in the email and on the banner, not as it was set up. A letter O where the system expects a zero is enough to break it.

Check what the code applies to, any minimum spend, and the products it excludes. A code that refuses half the catalogue reads as a trick, whatever the fine print says.

Check when it starts and ends, and which time zone the store thinks it is in. Then check that last week's codes are switched off, unless you promised otherwise.

Stock you can actually ship

A sale sells out the items it features, which is the point, and the stock count on the site is all that stands between a sell-out and an apology.

Compare the counts for the sale items with the shelves, now, before the first order. Make sure sold-out items say so, rather than taking orders you cannot fill.

Bundles and gift sets need their own look. They are often counted separately from the products inside them, and can keep selling after a component has run out.

A worked example

A coffee roaster selling beans, gift boxes and brewing equipment online ran a Black Friday code last year, announced by email as valid until midnight on Friday.

At nine on Friday evening the code stopped working, and the emails started. The roaster extended it by hand, but not before some customers had given up.

The store's time zone setting had never been changed from the default, several hours ahead of Pacific time. The code had expired at midnight, just not the roaster's midnight.

This year the time zone was corrected in October, the codes end at a time stated in the email with its time zone, and this morning each was tried on a phone before the email went out.

Speed when the traffic arrives

Load the home page, a sale product and the cart on a phone using mobile data, and note roughly how long each takes. That is the baseline.

Check again after each email goes out and at the busiest hours. If pages that took two seconds start taking ten, call the host before customers start leaving.

Have the host's support number and your account details written down. Today is not the day to search for them.

Someone answering

Customers with a problem at checkout will email or phone, and a quick answer turns many of them back into orders.

Make sure the phone is answered or forwarded, the contact inbox is watched, and social media messages have someone on them. Write down who is on duty, and until when.

Watch the payment processor's emails too. A hold on payouts or a fraud alert is easier to sort out at ten in the morning than at ten at night.

Through the day

The morning check is not the last one. Repeat the real order and the code test at midday and in the evening, quickly, on a phone.

Keep a short log of anything that goes wrong and what was done about it. It is the first thing to read when planning next year.

And note when the sale ends, so that the banner, the codes and the prices all end together.

The counter-case

A store not running a Black Friday sale has less to check, but the real order and the inbox are still worth ten minutes on any busy shopping day.

A very small store with a handful of products can do the whole list in twenty minutes, and should not let its length put it off.

And a business that does not sell online has its own version: the hours on its listing, a phone that is answered, and a gift card page that works.

For any store running a sale today, though, an hour of checks before the email goes out is the cheapest work of the whole season.

This morning

1. Place a real order with your own card.
2. Refund it once everything is confirmed.
3. Type every code exactly as printed.
4. Check the store's time zone and end times.
5. Compare stock counts with the shelves.
6. Time three pages on a phone.
7. Name who answers the phone and inbox.

Step four is the one that hides. The code works when you test it this morning, and the problem appears only in the evening, when the store's idea of midnight arrives before yours.

Why nothing else on the site should change today is covered in a change freeze before the busiest week.

Frequently asked questions

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