Is Your E-commerce Platform Ready for Black Friday & Cyber Monday?

Black Friday and Cyber Monday are the ultimate events in the e-commerce calendar. These two big events traditionally mark the start of the Christmas shopping season and are the two busiest shopping days of the year in the United States, as well as the rest of the world. These are the days when your website’s speed, stability, and customer experience (CX) can either make or break your entire quarter.

When millions of eager shoppers flood your site, there’s no room for “it worked yesterday” or “we didn’t expect that bug”. From slow load times to broken promo codes, even the smallest glitch can turn excitement into frustration, and clicks into cart abandonment.

That’s why preparing your e-commerce platform for these high-traffic events isn’t just about discounts and marketing campaigns - it’s about testing smart, testing early, and testing thoroughly to ensure it can withstand pressure, handle chaos, and deliver a flawless user experience when it matters most.

Your testing checklist to go for a stress-free Black Friday and Cyber Monday

These shopping phenomena continue to dominate the global retail landscape. As highlighted in last year’s New York Times article on Black Friday and Cyber Monday shopping trends, these events continue to dominate the e-commerce calendar, driving record traffic and influencing how retailers and consumers approach holiday purchases each year.

Given the economic reality, retailers need to test their websites and mobile apps to uncover and eliminate bugs and other anomalies. To help ensure your e-commerce platform is ready, here’s a testing checklist designed to make your Black Friday and Cyber Monday safer, faster, and more successful:

1. Take a closer look at your login journey

When it comes to login testing, there’s more to it than seeing the button flip from “Sign In” to “Sign Out. Here we talk about new and returning customers. Creating or returning to an existing account is the first step for short-term gains or long-term customer retention. 

To thrive during the most lucrative season in the e-commerce calendar, consider exhaustive testing of login validity (both email address and password only pass when valid), credential accuracy (no typos in the email address and password are accepted), account alignment (new and existing customers are navigated to the correct screen when login successfully), rewards (when applicable, redeemable rewards are added to the account after the successful login). Offering a guest checkout option can also be a game-changer!

2. Test discount code accuracy

Consumers are seeking deals, so it is only natural that we lean towards companies and brands that offer promotions they find the most attractive. But it is not only the biggest deal that can lead to an uplift in conversions. When you make sure that each discount code works exactly as intended and provides a seamless user experience, you ensure shoppers can redeem deals effortlessly, keeping the excitement high and conversions even higher. 

When testing discount codes, code accuracy is essential, ensuring that codes apply the correct discount to each item. 

• Capitalizations should be verified so that codes work regardless of case, improving the user experience. 
• Referral codes need to be checked to confirm that post-purchase emails send the relevant referral codes correctly. 
• Gift card redemption must be tested to make sure codes apply even when a user redeems a gift card. 
• Finally, code exclusions should be validated so that codes do not combine with other offers when relevant, preventing any unintended discounts or errors.

3. Verify cross-platform consistency

Understanding key Black Friday trends is one way to uplift your sales; however, we should also put an emphasis on our preferred browsers, because we all have one. No user wants to switch between browsers because of broken buttons, slow-loading checkout pages, or autofill errors. When customers can browse smoothly and complete payments without glitches, they’re far more likely to finalize their purchase - and even return later.

Your analytics can provide valuable insight into which browsers your customers most commonly use to access your e-commerce store. Once you identify these, it’s essential to ensure a smooth and consistent experience on each of them. This involves adding content validation to your UI tests to confirm that item details display correctly, and verifying item prices against data sources such as databases or APIs to maintain accuracy. Additionally, performing cross-browser testing on the most relevant devices and browsers for your audience helps guarantee that your store looks and performs flawlessly wherever your customers choose to shop.

3. Turn clicks into carts - and carts into conversions!

A little urgency can go a long way. Limited-time offers or flash sales are extremely effective for price-sensitive consumers; however, insufficient product descriptions or unexpected extra charges like shipping or taxes appearing at checkout can make shoppers feel they’re getting an unfair deal, often resulting in abandoned carts. 

By ensuring that the “Add to Cart” and “View Cart” buttons are accessible from anywhere, you’re not only nudging shoppers to act quickly but also committing them to seal the deal. Testing the stock availability, item accuracy, and sale prices while in the cart can lead to an easier and secure checkout.

4. Streamline the checkout process

Many new business owners find the idea of using just one payment platform appealing because it keeps things simple. However, offering multiple payment gateways provides several important benefits that can boost both customer satisfaction and overall profitability. If customers can’t find their preferred payment method, they will abandon their shopping carts.

Safety in a payment gateway is priority one. After all, that’s a gateway’s main job - encrypting customer data and transmitting it securely, so it is crucial to test all available payment methods (Apple Pay, Google Pay, PayPal, etc), as each may rely on a different backend gateway. Make sure to go through every possible screen navigation, including using the back button, since errors often appear when checkout involves multiple screens. Additionally, test how payments behave under poor network conditions, particularly on mobile devices. Transactions should either go through successfully or fail gracefully, without leaving customers unsure whether their payment was successful.

5. Turn checkout chaos into checkout charm

A long or confusing checkout is one of the main reasons shoppers abandon their carts. Minimize the number of fields, offer a guest checkout option, and use autofill where possible. The fewer steps, the better!

To create a smooth and efficient checkout experience, focus on how forms behave and what information is auto-filled. For existing accounts, ensure that addresses and contact details automatically populate to save users time. Include an option that allows customers to use the same address for both shipping and billing. Finally, make sure form fields adjust based on the user’s country - for instance, removing the “state” option in places where it doesn’t apply - to make the process more intuitive and personalized.

6. Speak your customer’s language

A multilingual online store enables you to tap into international e-commerce markets and improve the shopping experience for non-English speakers. By breaking the language barrier, you expand your global reach and tap into new markets. Even if your customers can navigate an English site, many of them will feel more confident ordering in their first language. This trust directly impacts your bottom line. Testing multilingual functionality ensures that translations are accurate, the layout adapts correctly to different text lengths, and key elements like buttons, menus, and error messages remain readable and aligned.

Native apps on platforms like Google Play and the Apple App Store often have country-based restrictions, so it’s important to verify that your app is available and functioning properly in all intended markets. Additionally, many websites and apps automatically redirect users based on their geolocation, so you should ensure that each user is sent to the correct regional site or URL to provide a consistent and localized experience.

7. See how your app handles the heat

Black Friday & Cyber Monday 2025 will crash your website unless you perform proper testing on the application’s speed, stability, and scalability while handling an increased workload. It is crucial that response times stay within acceptable limits and that pages load quickly across all browsers. 

Making sure the display resolution appears as expected on different browser types and device brands is another important use case to check if your app is able to handle a higher level of traffic. It’s also important to measure load times under various network conditions, such as weak 4G or 3G connections, to ensure the experience remains smooth even with slower internet. The app should perform reliably when other applications are running in the background, and load times should remain stable across different screen sizes and refresh rates. All these checks help guarantee a consistent, fast, and frustration-free experience for users, no matter how they access your store. 

As a major step toward making all these steps easier to execute, we can introduce you to Loadero, our end-to-end load and performance testing tool. Our app simulates real-world user activity to measure how your web application behaves under stress. 

The bottom line

Once defined by long queues and crowded aisles, Black Friday and Cyber Monday have now fully transitioned into the digital realm—where speed, stability, and seamless user experiences rule. But with that shift comes sky-high expectations. Millions of users flood online stores in a matter of minutes, and even the smallest performance hiccup can turn eager shoppers into lost sales.

That’s why preparation is everything. A solid testing strategy—backed by the right automation tools and a team that knows how to anticipate problems before they arise—can make all the difference between a smooth shopping experience and a system meltdown. From load testing and performance checks to security and usability testing, every layer of QA helps ensure your digital storefront can handle the pressure when it matters most.

When your systems run flawlessly, customers notice. They stay longer, spend more, and trust your brand enough to come back—not just for Black Friday, but all year round.