Black Friday represents the ultimate stress test for enterprise commerce platforms. Recent studies estimate downtime costs around  $9,000 per minute for medium and large businesses, and for retailers generating $500MM+ in annual revenue, those numbers scale proportionally. When your site goes down during peak traffic, you're not just losing sales - you're losing customer trust that takes months to rebuild.

We've helped Fortune 500 retailers navigate peak commerce events for over a decade. If you're coordinating Black Friday preparations across merchandising, marketing, and IT teams, here's what you need to discuss with your technical teams now.

Load Testing Conversations to Have

Your IT team should be running load tests that simulate Black Friday traffic - not normal day traffic. Ask them if they're testing at 15-20x your typical volumes, because that's closer to what you'll actually see. More importantly, make sure they're testing realistic customer behavior: people searching, filtering, adding items to cart, and checking out - not just hitting your homepage.

Search is where a lot of platforms slow down during promotions. When you're running hundreds of doorbusters and customers are frantically filtering by price and availability, your search functionality takes a beating. Talk with your IT team about whether your catalog can handle the surge. This isn't the kind of thing you want to discover at 6 AM on Black Friday.

If you're running on a microservices architecture, your catalog system operates independently from order processing, which provides some protection. But your promotional pricing still needs to work correctly when you're stacking Black Friday deals on top of existing offers. Make sure your IT team has tested complex promotion scenarios before the big day.

Understanding Your System's Backbone

Behind every order confirmation email and inventory update, there's a message queue processing thousands of events per minute. If that queue backs up at 2 AM on Black Friday, orders might come through, but fulfillment gets delayed - and suddenly you're dealing with angry customers who ordered 12 hours ago and haven't received shipping confirmations.

Ask your IT team about their message queue configuration. They should have backup systems for failed messages and a plan for scaling up when volume spikes. The difference between smooth order processing and a fulfillment nightmare often comes down to decisions made weeks before Black Friday.

What "Normal" Looks Like for Your Platform

You can't spot problems during Black Friday if you don't know what healthy traffic looks like. Work with your IT team to document baseline performance metrics before Thanksgiving week: how fast pages typically load, what your usual error rates are, and how quickly orders are processed on a normal day.

Your technical team also needs documented procedures for common problems: what happens if your payment processor goes down, how to escalate issues with third-party services, and who to call when things break. When your payment gateway starts failing on Black Friday morning, your team shouldn't be Googling for emergency contact numbers. Push for these runbooks to be written and tested before Thanksgiving.

Your Third-Party Service Dependencies

Take a hard look at all the external services your platform depends on: payment processing, fraud detection, tax calculation, shipping rates, and inventory management. If you're like most enterprise retailers, you're probably integrated with 20-50 different systems. Each one is a potential failure point.

Have an honest conversation with your IT team about fallback plans. If your tax calculation service goes down, can you fall back to estimated taxes and reconcile later? If fraud detection fails, do orders stop completely, or do you have backup rules? These services fail during peak events more often than you'd think.

Modern commerce platforms built on microservices architecture handle these failures better because they're designed with circuit breakers that prevent one failing service from taking down your entire site. But only if your team has implemented and tested them.

Inventory Accuracy Is Non-Negotiable

Nothing kills customer trust faster than overselling hot items on Black Friday. If you're managing inventory across multiple warehouses, stores, and distribution centers, real-time accuracy becomes incredibly complex when hundreds of customers are simultaneously trying to buy your doorbuster deals.

Talk with your IT team about how your system handles inventory reservation. When 500 people add the same TV to their cart at 6 AM, does your system properly reserve inventory for each customer, or are you at risk of overselling? The logic that works fine on a normal Tuesday often breaks under Black Friday pressure.

The same goes for order management. Your system might be great at accepting orders, but can it route them to fulfillment centers fast enough to keep up? Make sure your IT team has tested order processing under realistic Black Friday volumes, including complex scenarios like split shipments and backorders.

Search and Checkout Can't Slow Down

Product search traffic explodes during promotional events. Customers are filtering by price, comparing products, checking availability - all while your merchandising team is updating prices and inventory in real time. Your platform needs to handle all of this without slowing down.

The other critical area is checkout. Session management matters more than most people realize - customers shouldn't lose their carefully curated Black Friday cart if they switch from mobile to desktop. Your checkout needs to handle payment failures gracefully and preserve cart contents so customers don't rage-quit. One-click checkout and saved payment methods become essential when customers are racing to grab limited inventory.

Get Everyone on the Same Page

Black Friday preparation isn't just an IT problem. Your customer service team needs access to order management tools and clear escalation procedures. Your marketing team should understand system capacity limits so they can pace promotional emails and social posts if needed. Set up clear communication channels before Thanksgiving week.

When things go wrong during Black Friday (and something always does), you need rapid coordination across merchandising, IT, customer service, and leadership. Figure out communication protocols now, not at 3 AM on Black Friday when your site is struggling.

Black Friday 2024 saw U.S. consumers spend $10.8 billion online, marking a 10.2% increase from the previous year. The retailers who capture that revenue are the ones who prepared in October and early November - not the ones scrambling on Thanksgiving Day.