Black Friday: what to check in your catalogue
Black Friday does not create catalogue problems. It multiplies them by the number of visitors. A product nobody can buy costs you nothing in October, and in November it costs exactly what you paid to send traffic to it.
Why the catalogue, of all things
Black Friday guides agree on the list: discounts, email, page speed, server capacity. All of it is true, and all of it is about getting a person to the shop.
Almost none of them covers what happens once that person arrives. That is the part where the catalogue either sells or quietly sends the customer back to Google — and it does so in the one week when every visit has a price on it.
Seven things below cost the most precisely then. All are checkable before the campaign, and most take a quarter of an hour to fix.
1. Products that sold all year and cannot be bought today
The most expensive item on this list, and usually nobody knows about it. The product has a sales history, a decent position in search and traffic coming in — and its stock dropped to zero, someone hid it, or a variation stopped being available. The ad pulls people in and they hit a wall.
Detail: it sold for a year, today nobody can buy it
2. Sales that never ended
A July discount nobody switched off does two things at once: it eats your margin, and it makes your November price look like no discount at all, because the price was already lower. Before a campaign it pays to see every active sale in one place instead of trusting memory.
Detail: a sale that never ends
3. Products with no price
Published, in the catalogue, visible in search — and with no price, so unbuyable. For the customer it is a page with no way forward. For Google it is an offer without an offer.
Detail: published, listed, impossible to buy
4. Products where every variation is unavailable
The page looks normal, the customer picks a size, then a colour, and every combination comes back unavailable. That is worse than a missing product, because it wastes their time and ends in irritation — in the week when a competitor is one click away.
Detail: all variations out of stock
5. Coupons that outlived their limit
This one is specific to campaigns: codes get made for one promotion and then stay. Before Black Friday it is worth checking not only that the new coupons work, but that the old ones no longer do.
Detail: a coupon past its own limit
6. Menu links pointing at something nobody can buy
Menus and campaign landing pages get written once and rarely re-checked. If a menu entry leads to a product that cannot be bought, you are paying for traffic that walks into a dead end — from the most prominent place in the shop.
Detail: a menu link to an unavailable product
7. Scheduled actions that stopped running
The only technical item on the list, and the only one that can break a sale after the order: confirmation emails, stock sync, deferred payment actions. Under heavier traffic the queue grows faster, so a problem that is invisible in October becomes visible to customers in November.
Detail: scheduled actions are not running
When to do it
Now, not in November. Not because checking takes long — it takes a quarter of an hour. Because fixing some of these needs a decision rather than a click: what to do with a product that sold well and ran out, whether to reorder or to hide it. Nobody makes those decisions well in the last week of November.
How to check
There are two ways, and they differ in how much they can see.
From the outside, with nothing to install. Storefront Scan reads the shop’s public catalogue — the same one every visitor sees — and shows what is visible in it: products with no price, sold-out items left in the catalogue, missing images, duplicate product codes. It takes a dozen seconds, needs no account and changes nothing in the shop.
From the inside, with amounts attached. The free Merchlint plugin reads the shop’s own data together with order history, so it can say not only what is wrong but what it costs: which of these products were actually selling. It also stores nothing and sends nothing anywhere.
An honest caveat: money is invisible from the outside. Items 1, 5 and 7 on this list need data the public catalogue does not expose, and no tool working from the street gets around that. If you only check one thing before Black Friday, check the first one — and for that you need access to your own orders.
We checked how this looks elsewhere: Zero clean: 72 WooCommerce stores — the public catalogues of seventy-two Polish stores, every one of them with defects visible from the street.