Most Black Friday problems start weeks before the sale: a product page that crawls on mobile data, a wallet button that quietly disappeared in an app update, a “midnight” sale that actually starts at 11am. Black Friday lands on Friday 27 November this year and Cyber Monday on Monday 30 November. From mid-October that gives Australian online stores about six weeks: enough time to get properly match fit, not enough time to rebuild anything. Here is the game plan we run for Shopify and WooCommerce stores, in time blocks, so you know what to do this week and what can wait.
Reading this later in the season? Start with the block that matches today’s date, and do steps 3 and 4 (the checkout walk-through and card surcharges) whatever the date.
The Scoreboard: What Australian Shoppers Are Planning
Shopify’s 2026 Holiday Retail Report, as reported by Retailbiz, found Australians plan to spend an average of A$346 over the Black Friday to Cyber Monday weekend, up from A$324 last year, even as the global average fell. They are choosier too: 54% say economic conditions have hurt their holiday plans, and most would rather wait for the right product than grab the easiest one.
More of that research now happens with AI. In the same survey, 62% of Australians expect to use AI for at least one holiday shopping task. Trust drops off sharply after that: 41% would let AI build their cart, and just 29% would trust it to make a purchase on their behalf. AI is doing more of the scouting, but people are still taking the shot. Your store needs to win both halves.
Two Changes to Know About First
Click Frenzy has moved to October
Click Frenzy’s Main Event has run in November in recent years. This year it runs from Tuesday 27 to Friday 30 October, opening at 7pm AEDT on the Tuesday (6pm here in Brisbane). If you are taking part, treat it as a pre-season friendly that exposes weak spots a month early. If not, expect shoppers in deal mode sooner than usual.
Card surcharges are finished
From 1 October 2026, the eftpos, Mastercard and Visa networks brought in no-surcharge rules after the Reserve Bank removed its ban on those rules. American Express and UnionPay dropped surcharging from the same date, and PayPal followed on 5 October. There is no online exception: the RBA’s Payments System Board considered allowing surcharges on online card payments and rejected the idea.
Strictly, this is enforced through the card networks’ rules and your merchant agreement rather than a new law. The effect is the same, and it applies already: if your checkout still adds a fee for paying by card, take it off now. Step 4 below covers where to look.
Six Weeks Out (Mid-October): The Fitness Test
This block is about finding problems while there is still time to fix them.
1. Check your speed on a phone, not your laptop
Test the way your customers shop: on a phone, on mobile data, with one thumb and half their attention. Google’s Core Web Vitals give you three targets: the main content appears within 2.5 seconds (Largest Contentful Paint), the page responds to a tap within 200 milliseconds (Interaction to Next Paint), and the layout stays put (a Cumulative Layout Shift of 0.1 or less).
Google judges these on real visits at the 75th percentile, so three out of four page loads need to hit the mark, not just the ones on your office wifi. To see your own numbers, run your home page and a top product page through Google’s free PageSpeed Insights and read the real-user results at the top. The 0 to 100 score further down is a lab test, not what Google judges you on, though it is a useful guide if your store is too small to have real-user data yet.
If you miss, you are far from alone: in Google’s Chrome UX Report data for September 2026, only 55.9% of websites passed all three. The usual culprits are oversized hero images, apps or plugins loading scripts on every page, and pop-ups that arrive before the product does. Fix them now.
2. Make sure your hosting can take the hit
On Shopify, the servers are Shopify’s problem, one of the quiet advantages we weighed up in Shopify vs WooCommerce in Australia. Your job is making sure your theme and apps are not the bottleneck.
On WooCommerce, the servers are your problem. One Black Friday email can send a wave of visitors at once, all heading for the cart and checkout, the pages that cannot be cached. You want full-page caching everywhere else, a CDN in front of your images, and a host with genuine headroom, not a shared plan that throttles you at the worst possible moment. Not sure it will hold up? Find out now, while there is time to move. That is exactly what our managed hosting and performance team and WooCommerce developers do.
3. Walk your checkout on real phones
Put a real order through on an iPhone and an Android phone with every payment method you offer: card, Apple Pay, Google Pay, PayPal and any buy now pay later option. Then refund them. You are hunting for anything that breaks or surprises: a missing wallet button, a shipping option that vanishes for some postcodes, a confirmation email in spam.
4. Take card surcharges off your checkout
While you are in there, look for any fee added for paying by card, whether it is a surcharge line or an app or plugin that charges extra for certain cards. For Visa, Mastercard, eftpos, Amex, UnionPay and PayPal, it needs to go. Check your payment gateway settings as well as the store itself, because the fee can live in either place.
Two traps to avoid:
- Renaming it. A card surcharge relabelled as a “processing fee” is still a fee added because the customer paid by card. The ACCC still enforces the Australian Consumer Law on misleading price claims.
- Shifting it to buy now pay later. The RBA’s changes do not cover non-card payment methods, but that is not permission. The RBA’s own example of drip pricing is adding a payment surcharge after the customer has already decided to buy.
What you can do: build payment costs into your prices, or offer a discount for cheaper payment methods and make it obvious before the customer chooses how to pay. The RBA’s surcharging FAQ is the plain-English reference. One upside: the interchange cap on Australian-issued consumer credit cards also fell on 1 October, from 0.8% to 0.3% (business credit cards stay at 0.8%, and caps on overseas cards start on 1 April 2027), so ask your provider whether your fees will follow.
5. Plan offers you would be happy to defend
The honest-pricing test: could you show the price history behind every “was” price? If a product only sat at the higher price for a weekend in November, you would struggle to defend it.
Google runs its own version of the test. For a strikethrough sale price on Shopping ads in Australia, the original price must have been your price for at least 30 days in the past 200, so raising prices in November to “discount” them later may simply cost you the strikethrough. The practical upshot: settle your regular prices now and leave them alone until the sale. For free listings, the discount must be more than 5% and less than 90%, with both prices on the product page. The details are on Google’s sale price annotation page, and they are stricter than the US rules many overseas guides quote.
Settle your start date now too. Click Frenzy’s own sales calendar flags Black Friday early access from Friday 20 November, and the date you pick sets your code freeze, your email schedule and your race week.
Four Weeks Out: Get the Data Match Fit
Four weeks out is the end of October, as Click Frenzy wraps up. If you ran an offer, use it as your scouting report: what slowed down, what confused people, what flooded the inbox. Singles Day follows on Wednesday 11 November, two days before the freeze date we suggest below, so if you join in, keep that offer simple.
6. Stock accuracy and product feeds
Overselling a hero product means refunds, cranky emails and bad reviews. Count your top sellers and make sure your store, your warehouse or 3PL, and any marketplaces all agree. Then clear the warnings and disapproved products in Google Merchant Center, and get these sale-price rules right:
- The sale price in your feed must match the product page and checkout, and you still submit the full price as the regular price.
- Schedule each sale with start and end times and include the time zone. Leave it off and Google uses UTC, so a “midnight” sale starts at 11am in Sydney or 10am in Brisbane. Use +1100 for Sydney, Melbourne, Canberra and Hobart (daylight saving time), +1030 for Adelaide, +1000 for Brisbane, +0930 for Darwin and +0800 for Perth.
- Discounts that need a code belong in Merchant Center Promotions, not the sale price. Google asks for promotions at least 24 hours before they start.
Running Shopping ads? Google is trialling a “Deal Ends” countdown badge from 15 October to 5 January. To qualify, a deal needs at least 10% off, an end date within seven days, a price that is the product’s lowest in the past 60 days, and both a sale price and end date in your feed. Each product can show the badge only once every 60 days, and a deeper Click Frenzy price rules out a smaller Black Friday discount, so pick the one sale you want each product’s badge for. Australia is not on the trial’s excluded list, so you appear to qualify.
7. Publish your Christmas shipping cut-offs
Gift buyers on Black Friday want to know one thing: will it arrive before Christmas? Australia Post and the major couriers publish Christmas delivery cut-off dates. As soon as they are out, check them for the services you use, subtract your pick-and-pack time (allowing for the post-sale backlog), and add the result to your banner, product pages and cart before your code freeze. Update handling times in Merchant Center too, so Google’s delivery estimates stay honest.
8. Make your products readable by AI shopping assistants
Some shoppers will hand their shortlist to an AI assistant, and assistants read data, not design. The full story is in When the Customer Is a Robot; the short version:
- Check your product structured data. Google’s merchant listing rules require a name, image and an offer with a price and currency. Availability, shipping details and returns policy are recommended.
- Mark up sale prices properly, with the original shown as a strikethrough price, so machines see the same deal humans do.
- Write titles that say what the product is. Brand, product type and key spec beat a clever name.
- Publish your Christmas returns window. Google’s store-wide (organisation-level) returns markup supports a seasonal override with start and end dates.
9. Automate the “where is my order?” flood
It is the email that pours in after every big sale, and one of the easiest jobs to hand to an AI agent. Connected to your store and courier tracking, an agent can look up the order, give a real status, and pass only the tricky ones (damaged parcels, wrong items, upset customers) to a human. The catch is timing: it needs to be live and tested before your code freeze, or it breaks the no-new-apps rule below. If that is too tight this year, write saved replies for the common questions, make sure every shipping email carries a working tracking link, and build the agent in the new year. It is the kind of agent we build in our AI agents and automation work.
10. Build your email and SMS flows
Write and schedule campaigns now, not on Thursday night. Check the background flows too: make sure abandoned cart reminders quote the right price, codes inside flows still work, and everyone you message actually signed up.
Want a Second Set of Eyes Before Kick-Off?
We’ll check your speed, checkout, payments, product feeds and hosting, and hand you a prioritised fix list: what to tackle before the weekend and what can wait until January.
Ask for a Pre-Sale Store Check →Two Weeks Out: Code Freeze
Pick a freeze date, ideally Friday 13 November, and stick to it. If the fraud and backup steps below need a new app or plugin, install it before that date. After that, nothing changes unless it has to: no theme updates, no new apps or plugins, no “quick tweak” to the checkout. Nobody wears brand-new boots in a grand final.
11. Test every discount before your customers do
Test every code and automatic discount on a phone. Right products? Stacks as intended? Starts and stops on time? Watch combinations, like a sitewide discount plus a VIP code plus free shipping. That is where the expensive surprises live.
12. Tighten fraud screening
Fraudulent orders are easier to miss when volume spikes. Check what screening your payment provider already includes, switch on what is sensible, and decide who reviews flagged orders and how quickly. A high-value order with mismatched billing and shipping details deserves a second look before it ships.
13. Backups, monitoring and the team sheet
Take a full backup and confirm you can restore it, because a backup you have never restored is a hope, not a plan. Set up uptime monitoring that alerts a real person by SMS. Then write the team sheet: who to call if the site, payments or courier integration fails, with mobile numbers.
Race Week: 23 to 26 November
Opening early access on Friday 20 November? Then your race week comes a week early: get these checks done before your sale opens, and follow the match-day rules below from your first sale day.
- Schedule sale prices, banners and emails, then preview each one, time zones included.
- Run the full checkout test again on real phones.
- Recount stock on hero products and set low-stock alerts.
- Brief everyone who answers customers on offers, returns, shipping times and escalation.
- Log any app, plugin or theme support requests now: Thursday 26 November is US Thanksgiving, so US-based support teams may be slow to reply over the weekend.
During the Weekend: 27 to 30 November
Black Friday is Friday 27 November, Small Business Saturday is the 28th and Cyber Monday is the 30th. The match-day rules are short:
- Do not deploy. If something breaks, fix that one thing and nothing else.
- Place a test order every morning, then refund it.
- Watch the scoreboard: conversion rate, payment failures, speed, stock on best sellers, the fraud queue and the inbox.
- Act fast on sell-outs. Mark them out of stock everywhere, including your feeds.
- Keep a log of what went wrong and when, for the debrief.
After the Final Whistle
14. End your sales cleanly
When an offer finishes, put prices back up everywhere at the same moment: on the site, in your feed and in your structured data. If you scheduled end times in step 6, Google stops showing the sale price on its own, so your job is to check the site and structured data switched back with it. A strikethrough that lingers after the deal has ended is how customers stop believing your sales.
15. Hold the debrief while it is fresh
In the first week of December, go through your weekend log: what sold, what broke, what to fix. That list shapes your Boxing Day plan, and it is next year’s checklist, half written.
16. Plan Boxing Day
Boxing Day is Saturday 26 December, and every state and territory has a public holiday on Monday 28 December. In Tasmania the Monday is Boxing Day itself, and in South Australia both days are Proclamation Day holidays. Check the Fair Work 2026 public holiday list before you roster dispatch and customer service.
What Not to Panic About
- You do not need a new platform or a redesign. Six weeks out, the job is tuning what you have.
- You do not need to discount everything. Small Business Saturday is a good excuse to lead with what makes you different, not what makes you cheapest.
- AI shoppers will not replace your human ones this weekend. Clean product data helps both.
The Final Word
Black Friday rewards preparation more than heroics. The stores that have a good weekend are rarely the flashiest. They load fast on a phone, their checkout works with every wallet, their prices are honest, and their owner knows exactly who to call when something goes sideways.
Six weeks is plenty of time to be that store. Run the fitness test this week, freeze the code by mid-November, and let the plan do the work when the whistle blows.
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