Peak season checklist 2026: How to prepare your commerce platform for the holiday rush

The high stakes of Black Friday and Cyber Monday

Every year, Black Friday and Cyber Monday (BFCM) mark the most intense pressure test for brands and retailers. These days are synonymous with staggering spikes in online traffic, fierce competition for consumer attention and enormous revenue potential. For many brands, the holiday shopping season can represent as much as 20% of annual retail spending.

While peak season isn’t limited to BFCM, with events like Back-to-School and Valentine’s Day driving similar surges, the fact is that the holiday season is of strategic importance for the supermajority of retailers today. 

The BFCM season has evolved throughout the years. Once confined to a two-day weekend of doorbusters and flash sales, it has now expanded, with brands running six-week campaigns blending early urgency driven by product drops and social media surges, core-weekend deals and post-event bundles. 

This year, AI shopping is expected to have an immense impact on product discovery, comparison, and ultimately, conversion. Data from leading retailers show that AI site traffic generally accounts for 5% of referrals, with some cases closer to 10%. The same survey revealed that shoppers referred by AI tools generated 53% more revenue per visit than other shoppers.

In the US, nearly 132 million consumers have bought a retail product with AI’s help. And retail giants and brands, from Best Buy to Kate Spade, are betting heavily on AI-driven sales. This is where the commercetools AI Hub comes in, bringing AI-powered shopping tools, resources, and insights together in one place to help brands and retailers navigate the shift to AI-driven commerce.

This year, a growing share of that AI activity is shifting from recommendations to action, with shopping agents and AI assistants browsing, comparing and completing purchases on shoppers’ behalf. This behavior changes more than traffic volume. Agents can bypass the storefront and call commerce APIs directly, generate multiple requests for a single purchase, and retry automatically when they encounter delays. At the same time, bot protections designed to block unwanted automated traffic can also block legitimate shopping agents.

Readiness for peak season sales 

For enterprise retailers, these trends are both opportunity and risk. On one hand, sales windows are longer, demand is higher and channels are multiplying. On the other, 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. Agentic AI-generated 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 peak 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.

Best practices for functional readiness

The decisions made in October around promotions, carts, checkout logic and inventory can have just as much impact on the customer experience during Black Friday.

• Audit your promotions before the freeze: Peak is when campaign volume spikes, and teams often load in far more active promotions than they run at any other point in the year. Reviewing what’s live, what’s expired and what’s overlapping is quick to do in advance and painful to untangle mid-campaign.
• Tune your cart settings for peak volume: Create carts when a shopper adds their first item rather than on arrival, and shorten retention for peak-period and anonymous carts. Both keep your data footprint proportionate to a period that generates far more carts than orders.
• Review any custom logic in the cart and checkout path: If you’ve extended those flows, check timeout settings and make sure each step degrades gracefully rather than blocking the shopper. Anything on the critical path deserves a second look before a freeze.
• Validate stock at decision points: Confirm availability at add-to-cart and checkout, rather than relying on what was shown at browse time. On a normal day, the difference is academic. During a sell-out, it’s the difference between a clean stockout and orders you can’t fulfill.

Best practices for technical readiness

Once your functional setup is ready, focus on the application and integration layer that will carry the additional demand.

1. Communicate campaign and traffic expectations

Transparency is key. If you’re already a customer, work closely with your Customer Success Manager (CSM) to share:

• Planned load testing schedules.
• Anticipated traffic volumes.
• Major campaigns that could trigger sudden bursts.
• Expected AI-agent or automated traffic, where known. 

The earlier commercetools knows your expectations, the better we can align resources.

2. Prepare for AI-driven traffic

AI agents introduce a different traffic pattern from traditional storefront traffic. Before peak, make sure your automated traffic strategy is explicit:

• Give agent traffic its own credentials rather than sharing the storefront’s. This lets you see agent activity separately, control it independently and switch it off without touching your website if something goes wrong.
• Align with agent partners on peak behavior. Tell them your expected volumes, agree on how they’ll back off if you’re under pressure, and test together before the freeze.
• Decide which automated traffic is welcome. Controls designed to stop unwanted automated traffic can also prevent legitimate shopping agents from reaching the commerce APIs they need. Decide which automated traffic is welcome — and make sure your controls can distinguish it — before peak week.
• Check the limits on your own AI dependencies. External services, recommendation engines and model providers enforce their own rate limits and quotas. Verify your tier limits and fallback options with key partners in advance so that an agent experience doesn’t stall due to something entirely outside your platform.

As a general guideline, it’s crucial to prepare your product data for AI discovery. According to PYMNTS, merchants increasingly see agentic commerce as a real sales channel, but many still feel unprepared to connect to AI platforms and agent networks. Well-structured, complete and consistent product data is an important foundation for making products understandable and discoverable by AI agents. 

commercetools enables merchants to drive product discovery and selling across GenAI channels with the AI Hub. In addition to AI Hub, the Smart Data Modeler (included in the AI Hub) helps businesses structure and prepare product data for AI-driven commerce.

3. Implement robust error handling

Peak season means more requests and, inevitably, more edge cases. Protect your performance by:

• Adding a unique X-Correlation-Id to every request for faster tracing and debugging, especially during high-volume periods. 
• Configuring your application to capture and alert internal teams to specific exception codes and details returned by the commercetools platform.
• Implementing exponential backoff for retries, especially on concurrent modifications.
• Designing smart retry mechanisms for transient errors (like network hiccups). A general guideline is a ~2-second timeout for GET requests and ~5-8 seconds for POST requests.
• Logging all errors centrally and reviewing logs frequently to identify patterns, so you can identify and fix underlying technical implementation issues in your application. 

4. Enhance observability

Observability gives you visibility into what’s happening in real time. Best practices include:

• Centralized logging to capture and consolidate error data.
• Implement Application Performance Monitoring (APM) tools to track latency, throughput and bottlenecks. commercetools offers open telemetry support via SDKs for observability, providing insights into how well your application performs. 
• Additionally, commercetools offers Platform Insights as an add-on feature that allows analyzing metrics and server-side logs collected from commercetools APIs. 
• Alerting systems to flag anomalies before they impact customers.

5. Optimize API interactions

Every API call counts during peak season. Optimize your usage by:

• Caching static or slow-changing resources to reduce redundant calls.
• Ensuring gzip compression on API requests to compress response times, which is a default feature when using commercetools SDKs (e.g., Java SDK Middlewares). 
• Avoiding unnecessary queries or unbounded searches that stress APIs.

6. Follow performance and load testing guidelines

Use our official documentation to prepare:

• Performance tips cover query optimization and caching.
• Load testing guidelines help simulate realistic peak traffic.

Advanced guidance: Managing concurrency and throughput

For enterprise-scale retailers, concurrency and throughput management can be the difference between smooth scaling and overwhelmed systems. This is how commercetools Sphere handles parallel requests: 

• Circuit breaker protection: All our endpoints are protected by sophisticated circuit breaker logic. This complex algorithm acts independently across multiple layers to maintain platform stability under heavy loads.
• Concurrent connections: We generally advise that no SINGLE syncing application should maintain more than 20 concurrent connections to the platform.
• Testing for higher throughput: If your business objectives necessitate higher throughput, progressively ramp up your concurrent connections during testing until you observe significant 5xx errors. Should you encounter 5xx errors, a robust retry mechanism with exponential backoff and error handling is critical.
• Ramp-up strategy: For highly concurrent processes and load tests, always ramp up over the first 10-15 minutes. This allows the commercetools APIs to scale effectively to meet your increased demand.
• Staggering multiple projects: If you operate multiple commercetools projects that require separate high-concurrency sync updates, staggering their start times can help distribute the load and ensure optimal performance for all.

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.