BFCM 2026: How commercetools prepares for the holiday rush

How commercetools performed during the last Cyber Week sales 

For enterprise retailers, the holiday season presents both opportunities and challenges. 

On one hand, sales windows are longer, demand is booming and the potential for increased revenue is higher to the point that the Mastercard Economics Institute predicts the strongest holiday season in four years, with spending growth of 5.5% year over year. 

On the other hand, consumer attention span and patience are thinner than ever, as shoppers abandon a site after just a few seconds of latency or a single checkout error. AI-generated and agentic commerce traffic is also expected to increase exponentially during this timeframe. 

That’s why platform reliability is business-critical. Downtime or degraded performance during peak moments means more than lost sales; it’s also about lost trust. In an era of instant alternatives, customers won’t come back.

commercetools provides a scalable infrastructure that has scaled reliably through every peak season to date. During the 2025 Cyber Week, commercetools handled:

• $4.5B in total GMV processed, up 48% year-over-year. 
• $935M in Black Friday GMV alone. 
• A total of 31 million orders were processed across the platform during Cyber Week, with a peak volume of 6,800 orders per minute (113 orders per second). 

As the partner of choice for brands and retailers to meet customer demand on the fly, this is how we prepare for peak season, and how your business can do the same. 

How commercetools prepares for Black Friday and Cyber Monday season

At commercetools, peak readiness is built into our DNA as a cloud-native, API-first platform. We know our customers need confidence that their commerce infrastructure will hold under pressure, and we’ve engineered resiliency as a strategic advantage.

Here’s a look behind the scenes at how we prepare our systems for BFCM and other high-traffic moments.

1. Deployment freeze: Stability first

We implement a code deployment freeze for a few weeks during the BFCM season. Why? Because introducing new features or changes during the most critical sales period increases risk. By freezing our product deployments, we lock down stability so that nothing unexpected interferes with your busiest days.

The freeze applies only to our platform; customers may deploy according to their own schedule. That said, most of our customers run a freeze of their own, and the two working to a similar window is the safest arrangement. We share our dates in advance so you can plan around them.

2. Proactive pre-scaling through elastic infrastructure

Our teams don’t wait for traffic to surge: We pre-scale systems to absorb massive loads based on projected load. Because commercetools is built on cloud-native infrastructure, we can dynamically scale further as demand grows. This means whether your sales double or multiply tenfold, the platform adapts to the traffic as demand grows.

3. Protecting orders when demand outruns capacity

Auto-scaling takes a little time, and load shedding covers the gap. Under pressure, less critical traffic gives way first so the requests that matter the most can be served. This means:

• We prioritize critical transactions.
• We keep the platform serving as many requests as possible.
• We avoid unnecessary cutoffs that could prematurely halt revenue flow.

4. 24/7 monitoring and rapid response

Our global operations team monitors platform health around the clock. If we detect unusual error rates (like spikes in error responses, such as 500, 502, 503 and 504), we can dynamically adjust resource allocation and mitigate the traffic within minutes.

We also use circuit-breaker logic that dynamically adjusts to performance and load, allowing the platform to handle as many requests as possible in real time. 

The takeaway: commercetools customers head into BFCM knowing the foundation of their eCommerce — uptime, performance and scalability — is covered.

Turning peak pressure into peak performance

The holiday shopping season represents both immense pressure and immense opportunity. Shoppers expect speed, convenience and reliability. Retailers expect their platforms not just to survive, but to empower them to thrive.

At commercetools, we’ve engineered peak readiness into the foundation of our platform so you can navigate BFCM with confidence. Brands and retailers, including Pet Valu, L.L. Bean, Express, Chemist Warehouse, Sephora and Ulta Beauty, and even B2B enterprises like Viewrail, rely on commercetools to scale automatically, handling increased customer demand with speed, stability and reliability during BFCM.