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The Black Friday checklist for WooCommerce stores

A practical, week-by-week checklist to get your WooCommerce store ready for Black Friday and Cyber Monday — pricing, scheduling, performance and promotion.

· 2 MIN READ

Black Friday rewards stores that prepare early and punishes last-minute changes. Use this checklist to get your WooCommerce store ready without a stressful Thursday night.

Four weeks out: decide the offer#

  • Pick the products. Lead with items that have healthy margins and stock you can actually ship. Discounting your bestseller is not always necessary — bundling or discounting its accessories can work just as well.
  • Choose the mechanic. Product sale prices, a coupon, or both. Sale prices are visible everywhere; coupons are easy to share but invisible until checkout.
  • Check your stock. Make sure inventory counts are accurate so you don’t oversell.

Three weeks out: set it up#

  • Schedule your sale prices with start and end dates (step-by-step guide). Double-check your timezone in Settings → General.
  • Create coupons with usage limits and expiry dates, and test each one on a real cart.
  • Plan the sequence. Black Friday, the weekend and Cyber Monday can each have a different focus. Write it down with exact start and end times.

Two weeks out: test performance#

  • Load-test or at least speed-test your key pages. Traffic spikes expose slow plugins and heavy pages.
  • Review caching. Make sure your full-page cache won’t serve stale prices when the sale starts and ends; purge it on schedule or use cache-aware tools.
  • Update WordPress, WooCommerce and plugins now — never on the day.

One week out: promote#

  • Tell your email list and social followers what’s coming, and when.
  • Make sure every landing page shows the sale once it starts, not only the home page. Most visitors arrive on product pages and blog posts.
  • Prepare a short FAQ: shipping cut-off dates, returns policy, support hours.

On the day#

  • Check that prices switched at the right time and that coupons apply correctly.
  • Watch WooCommerce → Status → Scheduled Actions for anything overdue.
  • Keep an eye on stock and pull sold-out products from promotions.

After the sale#

  • Confirm prices reverted when the sale ended.
  • Compare revenue, conversion rate and average order value to a normal week.
  • Note what worked, while you still remember, for next year.

Let the drawer do the promoting#

Sale Drawer shows every product on sale in a slide-out drawer on every page of your store — starting the moment your scheduled sale starts and disappearing when it ends. With Sale Drawer Pro you can schedule Black Friday, the weekend and Cyber Monday as separate campaigns with honest countdowns, and see exactly how much revenue each one produced.