Published Oct 1, 2025

Is your tech stack ready for BFCM scale?

Ebru Saglam

Director of Product Marketing, Celigo

Every year, Black Friday Cyber Monday (BFCM) drives record-breaking revenue. In 2024, online shoppers in the U.S. spent over $41 billion during that weekend alone. On the surface, those numbers look like a win.

For many IT and operations teams, though, it was a different story. Out-of-stock items, late deliveries, and order issues left customers frustrated, and IT and operations teams exhausted. These challenges are not limited to peak season. A 2024 Celigo survey found that 85% of shoppers felt online retailers failed them year-round.

Why ecommerce operations break under pressure

IT leaders are familiar with the pattern: the business launches a major campaign, traffic surges, orders spike and systems begin to strain under the pressure.

Orders don’t sync quickly enough across platforms. Inventory data becomes unreliable. Fulfillment slows. Internally, teams shift from strategic work to triage, as support tickets multiply and manual workarounds take over.

These issues aren’t simply a function of volume. They stem from the way systems have been built or, maybe more accurately, patched together over time. Does your ecommerce environment rely on aging platforms, fragile point-to-point integrations, and processes that require constant human oversight? While these setups may perform under normal conditions, they lack the resilience and responsiveness required when demand surges.

This mismatch between business expectations and operational capacity becomes obvious and costly during high-volume events like BFCM. While the business moves forward, infrastructure holds it back. IT may manage to keep things running, but often at the cost of efficiency, accuracy, and team well-being.

At some point, patching things up isn’t enough. To get ahead, more importantly, stay ahead, the approach to systems, data, and workflows needs to change.

How to get your tech stack Black Friday ready

So how do you get ready? Short answer: modernization. This isn’t just replacing one outdated system with another. It is about building an infrastructure that can adapt, scale, and recover, especially when under pressure.

Systems must sync in real time, and your workflows need to keep running even as order volumes spike. If every update requires custom code, or every error needs manual intervention, that is not sustainable.

A modern ecommerce infrastructure, built on an intelligent automation foundation, prepares your business for the future by delivering:

Speed and efficiency in IT and back-office operations
Flexibility to meet fast-changing ecommerce requirements
Real-time, accurate data across systems
Scalability and robustness to handle peak sales
A standardized, centralized, and unified approach to automation

These aren’t abstract benefits – these directly reduce the kind of chaos that happens every BFCM and help you achieve operational readiness for peak season.

Proof it works: How popular brands nailed BFCM

Here are a few examples from companies that have already made the shift.

Therabody

Therabody faced challenges common to fast-growing retailers. Their systems couldn’t keep up with seasonal demand. Integrations were fragile. Order processing required constant oversight. Every year, they had to hire additional staff just to keep things moving.

With Celigo, they rebuilt their operations around a modern integration and automation layer. With this new foundation, they connected key systems, automated order and fulfillment flows, and gained real-time visibility into performance. As a result, they entered peak season with confidence and without any need for seasonal hires.

Outdoor Research

Outdoor Research also struggled during BFCM. Orders from their ecommerce site didn’t reach their ERP fast enough, causing fulfillment delays, inventory mismatches, and overwhelmed teams. While replatforming to Shopify helped, it was rebuilding their automation foundation with Celigo that made the real difference.

Today, order data flows to Microsoft Dynamics F&O in seconds instead of hours. The team has full visibility into each business process, and the seasonal backlog is no longer an issue.

In both cases, IT didn’t just fix broken systems. They transformed how their organizations operate under pressure.

What’s at stake

If your systems can’t scale for BFCM, they won’t scale when there is a new product launch, influencer-driven traffic, or a major promotion either.

Whether you’re on Shopify, BigCommerce, or Walmart marketplaces, the same cracks appear whenever demand spikes.

This is where IT has the opportunity to lead. By modernizing now, teams can do more than avoid downtime. They can show the business that growth is possible and ecommerce operations can scale without sacrificing performance, trust, or team well-being.

Want to hear how other IT leaders are preparing?

Watch our panel discussion:
Holiday-Proof Your Tech Stack: Ecommerce Automation for Peak Season

Hear directly from leaders at Walmart MCS, Pourri, and CQL. They’ll discuss how to identify weak points, automate critical workflows, and build systems that perform when pressure is highest.

Watch now