The Sunday before Black Friday
Two weeks before Black Friday 2025, Apple Pay stopped completing checkouts, address validation started rejecting valid addresses, the sitewide search button vanished, and shipping was calculating free when it shouldn't. All of it was found and fixed before the weekend. That is the actual job.
- Black Friday planning is mostly triage — deciding what to cut so the things that matter get tested properly.
- In the fortnight before BFCM 2025 we resolved an Apple Pay checkout failure, an address validation fault, a missing search button and a shipping calculation bug.
- On the Sunday before the weekend we shipped an unplanned change across every live product template. It went out clean because there was a process to put it through.
The brief
At this retailer's scale, Black Friday planning starts months out. Campaign concepts, discounts, bundles, landing pages, email, inventory, launch sequencing. By about day three the ideas start multiplying — one promotion becomes four, a landing page becomes a custom experience, someone suggests a countdown and someone else wants early access.
Cutting that list down is the visible part of the job. It isn't the important part.
What the last fortnight actually looks like
Campaigns don't fail on the big idea. They fail on the payment method that stopped completing checkouts eleven days out, on a shipping rule that calculates free when it shouldn't, on a search button that quietly disappeared.
In the two weeks before Black Friday 2025, working through a live store under campaign load, we found and resolved:
None of these were on the plan. Every one of them would have cost real money over the weekend, and three of them sit directly on the path between a customer deciding to buy and the order actually landing.
The Sunday
On Sunday 23 November, with the campaign already scheduled, the store needed a change that wasn't in the plan: campaign shipping timelines communicated directly on the product page, below the add-to-cart button, across every live product template. Plus footer FAQ changes and a new checkout image widget.
That is exactly the kind of request that goes wrong — a sitewide template change, made under time pressure, days before the highest-traffic weekend of the year.
It went out cleanly because there was somewhere to put it: a team already inside the store, a testing routine already running, and a priority path for anything store-breaking with a 48-hour commitment behind it.
Why this is the case study
The version of this article we could have written describes our Black Friday process. Every agency has that page.
This is more useful: on a large Shopify Plus store, in the two weeks before Black Friday, four things broke on the checkout path and one unplanned sitewide change had to ship on a Sunday. The campaign ran.
A good Black Friday launch isn't the one with the most features. It's the one where nothing you didn't plan for reaches a customer.
Put your store through the same read.
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