# The Black Friday checklist for WooCommerce stores

Source: https://salesdrawer.com/blog/black-friday-woocommerce-checklist/ · Published 2026-09-30

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

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](/blog/how-to-schedule-a-sale-in-woocommerce/)). 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](/pricing/) 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.