Blog · Traffic peaks
CyberMonday starts November 2. If your e-commerce site hasn't passed a stress test, you're already behind
CACE, Argentina's e-commerce chamber, confirmed the dates: CyberMonday runs November 2 to 4, and Black Friday falls on the 27th. Five weeks is enough to measure your limits, add caching, and freeze changes. It's not enough to rewrite the checkout.
What CACE confirmed
CyberMonday runs from Monday, November 2, to Wednesday, November 4: 72 official hours, with nearly a thousand brands across twelve categories, from appliances and tech to groceries and travel. As in previous years, most retailers will extend their deals through the whole week. Black Friday falls on Friday, November 27. CACE doesn't organize it; each brand does, and the deals usually continue on Saturday the 28th and Sunday the 29th.
May's Hot Sale, Argentina's largest online sales event, is a useful reference for the shape of the peak: according to CACE, it topped 6 million orders, 93.4% of purchases were made on a phone, and activity peaked between 10 and 11 p.m.
What you can do in five weeks
The first step is finding out where the site breaks. A load test over the full journey (home page, search, product, cart, and payment) shows what gives way first: the database, the payment provider, inventory control, or an external service nobody had on their radar. That tells you what to reinforce.
Then come the quick wins: cache the catalog and product pages, review your autoscaling limits and your cloud account quotas, and write down what each person does if something fails on the night of the 2nd.
What not to touch
Rewriting the checkout, migrating the database, or adding a new payment method weeks before the event changes exactly what the test just measured. Those projects belong in January. Until November 4, every change in production has to justify why it can't wait.