Black Friday is Friday, November 27 this year, and Cyber Monday is November 30. If you run a Shopify store, you've got a little over three weeks. That's plenty, as long as you work in order and stop making big changes before the rush hits.
I've split the work into three weeks, each with its own focus. That way you're not fixing your theme, writing emails and counting stock on the same Tuesday night.
Week 1: Plan Your Offers and Check Your Foundation
Decide What You're Promoting
Write the offer plan before you touch the store. Which products are in? Is it sitewide, one collection, a gift with purchase, or free shipping over a threshold? When does each offer start and stop? Put it all on one page and share it. When your team, your agency and your email person all work from the same doc, half the weekend problems never happen.
Then check your margins. For every discounted product, work out what's left after the discount, shipping and payment fees. The classic mistake is a best seller that loses money on every order, and nobody notices until Monday.
Run a Quick Store Health Check
Your busiest weekend is a terrible time to find a broken page. Walk through the store on a phone and on a desktop: homepage, a collection, a product page, the cart, checkout. My Shopify store audit checklist covers what to look for, from site speed to checkout friction. Fix what's actually broken and park the redesign ideas until January.
Review Your Apps
Every app adds weight. Go to Settings > Apps and sales channels and be honest about what you still use. Uninstall the rest. Then test the ones you depend on (reviews, upsells, subscriptions, shipping rates) with a real order, not a glance at the settings page.
Week 2: Build, Load and Test
Set Up Your Discounts in Advance
Build your codes and automatic discounts now, and set the active dates in Shopify so they start and end on their own. Always set an end date. A sale that quietly keeps running into December is a common mistake and an expensive one. Shopify's discounts documentation explains the options, including how combinations work.
Then test every offer, the boring way:
- Apply each code in a real cart and check the price
- See how discounts stack, or don't, with each other. This is where most surprises come from.
- Confirm excluded products are actually excluded
- Free shipping threshold: does it calculate correctly after the discount?
- Make sure the offer and its end date show clearly on product and cart pages
Check Inventory and Fulfillment
Confirm stock on the products you're featuring, and decide now what happens when one sells out. Review your locations and stock settings in Shopify's inventory and locations settings. On each featured product, check whether "Continue selling when out of stock" is ticked. If it is and you didn't mean it, you'll oversell.
Call your warehouse or fulfillment team this week, too. Talk volume, cut-off times and holiday carrier schedules.
Prepare Your Storefront
Build the holiday banners, collection pages and announcement bar messages, but don't publish them yet. Here's what I do: duplicate the live theme (Online Store > Themes, then Duplicate), make the holiday changes on the copy, and preview it on your phone. When the sale starts, you publish the copy. If something goes wrong, the old theme is right there.
Keep design changes small. The week before Black Friday is not the week for a new theme.
Make Gifting Easy
Lots of holiday shoppers are buying for someone else. Add a gift guide collection, sorted by price or by who it's for. Put gift cards somewhere obvious. Offer gift notes or gift-ready packaging only if your team can actually fulfill them every time. And reread your size guides as if you were buying for your sister, because a gift buyer can't try it on for the person getting it.
Week 3: Communicate and Lock It Down
Update Your Policies and Shipping Messaging
Shoppers want to know when it'll arrive and how gift returns work. Publish your holiday shipping cut-off dates, any extended return window and your customer service hours for the long weekend. Put that on product pages and in the cart. The footer alone won't do it.
Schedule Your Emails and Social Posts
Write and schedule the early access, launch, reminder and last-chance messages. Send every test email to yourself and click every link. Each one should land on the right collection with the offer already showing. Broken email links on Black Friday morning hurt.
Brief Your Team
Everyone needs the offer details, the schedule and the name of the person to call when something breaks. Write a short cheat sheet for the usual problems, like a code that won't apply or a product that sells out early. If the site goes down, check Shopify's status page before you start changing things. Decide who's on call each day of the weekend, and put it in writing.
Set a Change Freeze
Pick a date, ideally a few days before Thanksgiving on November 26. After that, only essential fixes go live. No new apps. No theme edits. No untested code. I'd hold this line even when someone has a great idea on Wednesday night. Write it down for January.
During the Weekend: What to Watch
Check the store a few times a day while the sale runs. Place a small test order each morning and make sure it goes all the way through. Keep an eye on sales, conversion rate and top products in Shopify analytics.
Watch your customer service inbox for patterns. If three people ask the same question, the answer belongs on the product page or in your FAQ, today.
After Cyber Monday
Before you collapse, take an hour to write down what worked and what didn't. Which products sold. Which emails got opened. What broke and how you fixed it. You will not remember any of it next October. That page becomes the first draft of next year's plan.
Want Help Getting Holiday-Ready?
Holiday prep is a lot to carry on top of running a business. At Ellise Luxxe Consulting®, I work as a fractional eCommerce manager for Shopify and Salesforce Commerce Cloud brands, planning promotions, coordinating site updates and keeping launches on schedule. If you'd like an outside look before the rush, a store audit gives you a fix list in priority order that you can start on right away.
If you're not sure where to start, book a free strategy call. We'll figure out what matters most before Black Friday and what can wait.