If your software runs checkout for retailers, your Black Friday readiness over the next three weeks will shape how many of them renew next year. Thanksgiving falls on Nov. 26, Black Friday on Nov. 27, and Cyber Monday on Nov. 30, and the traffic will arrive whether your platform is ready or not. Adobe forecasts that U.S. shoppers will spend $275.1 billion online between Nov. 1 and Dec. 31, up 6.7% from last year, with Cyber Week alone driving $47.5 billion. The National Retail Federation (NRF) expects total November and December retail sales to grow 4.2% to $1.013 trillion.
For independent software vendors (ISVs) that build point of sale (POS), e-commerce, and order management software, Black Friday readiness is a product decision as much as an operations task. We published a Black Friday checklist for ISVs in 2024. Since then, AI shopping agents, bot traffic, and a major cloud outage have raised the bar. Here’s an updated plan you can finish before the first doorbuster.
Freeze changes and test for the spike
Pick a code freeze date now and tell your merchants what it is. A freeze that starts the week before Thanksgiving and runs through Cyber Monday keeps risky releases off your busiest days, and announcing it early gives customers time to request the fixes they need first. Keep an emergency path for security patches, with a named approver.
Then load test against real peak numbers. Adobe expects Cyber Monday to bring in $15.1 billion online in a single day and Black Friday $12.9 billion, with Black Friday growing faster (9.2%). Test checkout, inventory lookups, promotions, and payment authorization at several times last year’s busiest hour. Include the third-party application programming interfaces (APIs) you depend on, such as tax, shipping, and loyalty services, because merchants will blame your software when one of them slows down.
Assume a cloud provider or partner will fail
Last fall showed how far one failure can spread. According to Amazon Web Services’ (AWS) post-event summary, a latent race condition in the Amazon DynamoDB domain name system (DNS) management system left an empty DNS record for the service’s regional endpoint in its Northern Virginia region. The event ran from 11:48 p.m. PDT on Oct. 19, 2025, to 2:20 p.m. PDT on Oct. 20, and many applications that never called DynamoDB directly still felt it through the services that did.
You can’t prevent that kind of outage, but you can decide in advance how your product behaves during one. For in-store POS, that means an offline mode that keeps lanes open: local price and tax tables, queued transactions that sync when the connection returns, and store-and-forward card processing within limits your merchants and processor have agreed to. Test it by cutting the network in a lab store, not by hoping. Our guide to building business continuity into your softwarecovers the design choices in more depth.
Make your POS easy for seasonal staff
The NRF expects retailers to hire between 325,000 and 375,000 seasonal workers this year. Many of them will use your software for the first time on the busiest shift of the year, with a line out the door.
Walk through the flows they’ll hit most often, such as returns without a receipt, gift receipts, split tender, and gift cards, and count the taps. Payment options matter too: Adobe expects buy now, pay later (BNPL) to drive $21.3 billion in online spending in November and December. Send merchants a one-page quick-start guide and short training videos now, and check that role permissions stop new hires from issuing large refunds without a manager.
Filter bots without blocking real shoppers
A big share of your holiday traffic won’t be human. Imperva’s 2025 Bad Bot Report found that automated traffic made up 51% of all web traffic, and that bad bots alone accounted for 37%. The 2026 edition, based on 2025 activity, says bots now account for the majority of global web traffic and points to agentic AI as a new class of automated traffic.
Some of that automation is welcome. Adobe expects traffic from AI tools to U.S. retail sites to rise 130% this season. The rest includes card testing on checkout, gift card balance checks, inventory hoarding, and account takeover attempts. Add rate limits and velocity checks to your payment, gift card, and login endpoints, and use bot management at the edge so a real shopper sees a challenge only when the risk is high. Decide now how you’ll treat legitimate AI shopping agents. Our article on how agentic commerce fraud looks clean explains why that line is getting harder to draw.
Lock down the payment page before the freeze
Holiday checkout pages are a prime target for e-skimming, where attackers slip malicious scripts onto the page to copy card data. The Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS) addresses this in Requirements 6.4.3 and 11.6.1, which the PCI Security Standards Council says focus on making sure payment page scripts are authorized, checked for integrity, and monitored for tampering.
Review your script inventory before the freeze starts, and don’t let a last-minute marketing tag skip that review. If you host payment pages for merchants, confirm your tamper detection alerts reach someone who will act on them over the holiday weekend. Our article on what ISVs still get wrong about PCI DSS 4.0.1 covers the common gaps.
Staff a holiday war room
Decide who is on call from Thanksgiving through Cyber Monday, and give them direct escalation contacts at your payment processors, hosting providers, and key API partners. Prepare a status page and message templates so merchants hear from you before they have to call. If something does break, an incident response checklist built for smaller ISVs will help your team act in the right order.
Log every ticket by cause. In January, those records become your roadmap, as we explained in our guide to turning holiday support tickets into a Q1 development strategy.
Finish Black Friday readiness in three weeks
Start by setting your code freeze date and announcing it to merchants this week, then run load tests on checkout and payment paths. Next, run an outage drill that takes down a cloud service or partner API and confirm your offline mode works. Then review your payment page scripts and bot rules, and send merchants training material for seasonal staff. Finally, staff your war room from Thanksgiving through Cyber Monday and log every ticket.
Merchants remember which software vendors held up on their busiest weekend. The ISVs that prepare now will walk into January renewal conversations with proof, while their competitors are still explaining what went wrong.
