Black Friday and Cyber Week
Forecast concurrent shoppers on browse, PDP, cart, and checkout. Find the ceiling while there is still time to fix it.
Use case · Peak readiness
Black Friday load testing that happens before Black Friday.
Your biggest sales day should not be your first test. Peak readiness is a rehearsal of the journeys that matter at the concurrency and surge shape you expect on the day. Evaluat runs those journeys in real browsers and returns a verdict you can act on while there is still time to ship fixes.
Performance Testing is available through assisted private access. Useful rehearsals need lead time, and fixes need shipping time, so the window closes earlier than it feels.
Moments that matter
When teams book a peak rehearsal.
Flash sales and drops
Surges arrive in minutes. Rehearse the spike shape, not only the all-day volume.
Press, TV, and influencer moments
Landing pages that look fine on a quiet Tuesday can stall when a campaign lands everyone at once.
Launch and cutover days
New theme, new checkout, new platform. Run the same journey before and after so regressions do not ship with the launch.
A simple plan
Scope, rehearse, fix, re-run.
1. Scope the day
Pick the journeys that make money, the regions that matter, and a concurrency target tied to your forecast, not a vanity number.
2. Rehearse early
Run a bounded real-browser test. Generate an Executive Summary for stakeholders. Give engineers the sessions that failed.
3. Fix and re-run
Ship the fixes that matter. Re-run the same scenario so you know the change held under the same conditions.
Related reading: the 12-week Black Friday plan, spike testing, stress testing a website, ecommerce performance testing, Magento load testing.
What it costs to find out late
Put a number on the hour you cannot afford.
Rehearsals get approved when someone can say what the alternative costs. Set your sale up here and the per-minute figure is the one to take into the budget conversation. Full version on the downtime cost calculator.
Your sale
Those two are example figures, not your data. They sketch a big-ticket retailer on a peak sale day. Average order value swings enormously by sector, and order count is just revenue divided by it, so put your own numbers in before you quote the result to anyone.
£6,250 at risk
Start 24 hour sale
Revenue at risk
£6,250
30 minutes down in a 24 hour sale. About 25 orders. That is 97.92% uptime across this campaign, not across the year.
£208
Every minute is worth
0.83
Orders per minute
£300,000
Sale revenue
This spreads your orders evenly across the sale. Real sales are front loaded, so an outage in the launch hour costs more than this, and some interrupted shoppers do come back. Treat it as the order of magnitude, not the invoice.
And if it never goes down, just gets slow?
A site that stays up but crawls at checkout still loses the order. Hard down is a hosting problem. Slow under load is the one a performance test finds, and it is the more common of the two. Fair warning on the second slider: nobody publishes a measured abandonment rate for a site that is slow rather than down. We looked. So treat 20% as a placeholder to argue with, not a finding, and move it to whatever your own analytics say.
£2,500
on top, from about 10 abandoned orders
Questions
FAQ
What is peak readiness testing?
It is a planned rehearsal of your critical journeys at the concurrency and traffic shape you expect for Black Friday, a product drop, a press moment, or a flash sale, measured in real browsers before the event.
When should we start?
Early enough to ship fixes. Black Friday 2026 is 27 November. Theme, checkout, and third-party changes need lead time, so useful rehearsals usually start weeks earlier, not the week of the event.
What traffic shape do you use?
We size the run with you: ramp, hold, and surge profiles that match how your visitors actually arrive. A polite all-day average is not the same as a five-minute email spike.
Is this available now?
Performance Testing is available through assisted private access.