Black Friday falls on Friday 27 November 2026 and Cyber Monday on Monday 30 November, with Click Frenzy’s main event running from 27 to 30 October. For Australian online stores, the next eight weeks are the busiest of the year. In 2025, CommBank iQ reported $23.8 billion spent across the two-week Black Friday period, with about $8 billion of it online, and online spending grew faster than in-store.
That traffic is an opportunity only if your store can handle it. Here is a practical readiness checklist for WooCommerce and Shopify stores, from a Brisbane team that has supported a supplements retailer through 20,000 concurrent shoppers on its biggest sale day, with a checkout response time of 380ms at the 95th percentile and no downtime.
Key dates for 2026
| Event | Date |
|---|---|
| Click Frenzy main event | 27 to 30 October |
| Black Friday | Friday 27 November |
| Cyber Monday | Monday 30 November |
| Australia Post Christmas cut-offs | Mid to late December, depending on destination; check Australia Post’s live page |
| Boxing Day | Saturday 26 December |
Six weeks out: performance and capacity
- Load test checkout, not just the home page. Checkout is where stores fail.
- Check hosting limits. Shared hosting rarely survives a big sale. Ask your host what happens at ten times normal traffic.
- Put a CDN in front of the store and cache everything that can be cached, while making sure carts and checkout bypass the cache.
- Remove slow plugins and apps you do not need. Every extra script slows mobile shoppers. See why your website might be slow.
- Freeze changes a week before Black Friday. No new plugins or theme updates during the peak.
Four weeks out: payments and fraud
- Confirm your payment gateway can handle peak volume, and that 3-D Secure is enabled to reduce fraud.
- Offer Apple Pay, Google Pay and buy-now-pay-later if your customers use them.
- Remember that card surcharges changed this year. Our card surcharge guide covers what to update.
- Have a backup payment method ready in case your main provider has an outage. See our payment resilience checklist.
Will your store survive Black Friday?
We load test, tune and monitor WooCommerce and Shopify stores for peak sales, and stay on call during the event.
Two weeks out: stock, shipping and messaging
- Sync stock levels between your store, warehouse and marketplaces so you do not oversell.
- Publish clear shipping cut-off dates for Christmas delivery, and update them as Australia Post confirms dates.
- Check order confirmation emails and SMS. Make sure your SMS sender ID is registered, or texts will show as “Unverified”.
- Set up SPF, DKIM and DMARC for your domain so sale emails reach inboxes.
During the sale
- Monitor uptime, checkout errors and payment failures in real time.
- Have someone on call who can roll back a change.
- Prepare a holding page and customer message in case of problems.
- Watch for fraud spikes and unusual order patterns.
Protect customers from scams
Scammers copy popular stores with fake sites and fake delivery texts during sales. Tell customers how you contact them, never ask for card details by text, and consider monitoring for look-alike domains.
After the sale
- Review which channels and products drove sales.
- Check abandoned cart rates and checkout errors.
- Plan improvements before Boxing Day and next year.
FAQ
When should we stop making changes to the store?
A change freeze about a week before Black Friday is a sensible default, with only urgent fixes after that.
Is shared hosting enough for Black Friday?
For small stores with modest traffic, sometimes. For stores expecting large spikes, managed or cloud hosting with caching and a CDN is much safer.