Most retailers still plan the holiday season around a single weekend. Black Friday arrives, traffic spikes, and the checkout gets its first real stress test of the year with everyone watching. This year that plan has two problems. The season now starts weeks earlier, and most of the people trying to pay you will be doing it on a phone.
Black Friday falls on November 27, which is roughly five weeks away. That’s enough time to fix the checkout, but not enough to leave it for later.
The real risk is assuming your store is ready because it performed well during a normal week. Higher traffic can expose slow pages, payment failures, and checkout issues that are easy to miss when order volumes are low. A few targeted fixes now can help you avoid lost sales when demand peaks and every completed order counts.
Start by reviewing the entire buying journey on a mobile device, from the first product page to the order confirmation. Check whether customers can find delivery information, understand the total cost, and complete payment without unnecessary steps. Test these changes before the rush begins, so your team has time to fix problems rather than troubleshoot them during the busiest shopping days.
The goal isn’t to rebuild your store before Black Friday. It’s to identify the friction that stops customers from buying and remove it before traffic picks up. A faster, simpler checkout can help you make better use of the traffic you’ve already worked hard to attract.
Where the Money Is Going to Be Spent
Adobe expects 57.4% of US holiday online spending to happen on mobile devices, up from 56.4% last year. Its forecast puts total online holiday sales at $275.1 billion, up 6.7%, with Cyber Week bringing in $47.5 billion and Cyber Monday alone reaching $15.1 billion.
Buy now, pay later is growing alongside it. Adobe projects $21.3 billion of holiday spending through BNPL, up 6.6%, and most of that is forecast to happen on mobile, at around 82% of BNPL spend. In other words, the shopper most likely to use a flexible payment option is also the one tapping through your checkout with a thumb.
Adobe says early sales events have “changed the shape of the holiday season.”
October is already forecast at $95.8 billion in online spending, up 8%, which means the rush has started before most stores have finished preparing for it. If you run an online store, you’re likely part of this season already, which is why our work with e-commerce brands tends to start with the checkout rather than the homepage.
The Checkout Is Where Most Sales Leak
Baymard Institute’s long-running research puts the average documented cart abandonment rate at roughly 70%. Some of that is unavoidable, since many shoppers are simply browsing. But around 17% of US shoppers in its latest survey said they had abandoned an order in the past three months because the checkout was too long or complicated.
The fix is more achievable than most teams assume. Baymard finds that most checkouts can cut the number of form elements shown by 20% to 60%, and it recommends a full flow of around 12 to 14 elements. Fixing the checkout usability problems that design can solve would lift conversion by about 35% for the average large e-commerce site, according to its testing. For stores running paid campaigns into the season, that’s money already spent on getting the shopper to the door. It’s the same reason we treat conversion as part of digital marketing rather than a separate design task.
Why BNPL Changes How You Design Checkout
BNPL isn’t just another payment button. It shapes when shoppers decide to buy, which means placement matters.
Showing the instalment option only at the final payment step wastes most of its effect. Shoppers compare prices on the product page and in the cart, so that’s where the option needs to appear. The terms need to be clear at the same moment, including what the shopper will pay and when, because a surprise at the last step is exactly the kind of friction that sends people away. Extra costs such as shipping and taxes are the most commonly cited abandonment reason in Baymard’s survey, so any payment option that clarifies the total tends to help rather than hurt.
A Practical Fix List for the Next Five Weeks
Shorten the form. Remove every field you can live without, and offer guest checkout. Forced account creation is a documented reason shoppers leave. The fewer steps customers need to complete, the easier it is for them to finish their purchase.
Offer express payment. Digital wallets let a mobile shopper pay in a couple of taps instead of typing a card number on a small keyboard. Make sure your payment options work smoothly across devices and the methods your customers prefer.
Put BNPL where decisions happen. Show it on product and cart pages, with clear terms, not just at the end. Showing payment options early helps shoppers understand what they can afford before reaching checkout.
Show the total early. Surprise shipping and tax costs are among the leading reasons people abandon, so make delivery cost and timing visible before the payment step. Slow delivery was cited as a reason by 21% of shoppers in one Baymard-based summary. Clear pricing and realistic delivery estimates help customers make informed decisions and reduce last-minute drop-offs.
Test on real phones under load. With Cyber Monday forecast to pass $15 billion in a single day, a checkout that works on your laptop isn’t proof it will hold up on a mid-range phone during peak traffic. Test payment failures, page speed, and checkout performance before the sale begins to catch issues early.
Prepare for AI-driven shoppers. Adobe projects traffic to US retail sites from AI chat and browser services to rise 130% this season, and shoppers who use AI to research report feeling more confident and less likely to return what they buy. Clean product data helps those visitors find you, as we covered in our guide to agentic commerce. Keep product descriptions, pricing, availability, and specifications accurate and consistent so AI tools can present reliable information.
Recover abandoned carts automatically. Even a well-built checkout loses people, so set up reminder flows before the rush through automation rather than trying to build them mid-season. Use timely, relevant reminders to bring shoppers back while their purchase is still on their mind.
A Pre-Black Friday Checkout Checklist
- Count your checkout form fields and remove any that aren’t essential
- Confirm guest checkout works on mobile without forcing an account
- Add at least one express wallet option if you don’t have one
- Show BNPL messaging on product and cart pages, with clear terms
- Display shipping cost, taxes and delivery date before the payment step
- Test the full purchase flow on several real phones, on mobile data, not just wifi
- Run a load test at a multiple of last year’s peak traffic
- Turn on abandoned-cart reminders and check that they send correctly
- Review product data and structured markup so AI shopping tools can read it
- Freeze major site changes about a week before Black Friday
Don’t Let the Last Step Undo the Rest
By the time a shopper reaches checkout, you’ve already paid for the ad, built the product page and earned the click. The checkout is the one step where all of that either turns into revenue or quietly disappears. With more than half of holiday spending on phones and a growing share going through instalment payments, it’s also the step most likely to be judged on a small screen in a hurry. We’ve shown how we approach conversion-focused builds across our case studies, and the pattern holds: the stores that fix this early spend the busiest weekend of the year watching orders come in rather than fixing things.
A smooth checkout does more than prevent abandoned carts; it builds confidence at the moment customers are ready to buy. Small improvements to payment options, page speed and pricing clarity can make a measurable difference to completed orders. Review your checkout now, while there’s still time to fix the gaps before peak-season traffic arrives.
