At some point before Black Friday, many ecommerce sites stop changing. Larger retailers put a code freeze in the release calendar. Smaller teams get there another way: the developers or the agency are booked until January, and nobody wants to risk a release on a live site in November.
The orders keep coming after that point. On nShift's platform, Black Friday 2025 carried more than twice the shipments of an ordinary early-November Friday, and the peak lasted five weeks, from 17 November to 21 December. Carriers get stretched, retailers ship through the weekend after Black Friday, and returns peak after Christmas.
Many of the costs on those orders depend on choices made outside your webshop code: the delivery offer at checkout, the carriers you show, the tracking alerts and the return terms. When your team controls them as settings in a delivery platform, they can usually still change after the freeze starts. In my conversations with retailers ahead of peak, delivery offers and return rules get the most attention, so here are the five changes I'd make for Black Friday 2026, and how each one works in nShift.
Weather Warriors, the nShift demo store, is where I show retailers what nShift can do. On 5 November, my colleague Sophie Jonsson and I will walk through these changes on one Black Friday order in Solved, nShift's 30-minute webinar series. Save your seat here.
Quick answer: a code freeze stops releases of your website's code. Delivery and returns settings held in a delivery platform, such as dated checkout offers, carrier options, tracking alert days and return rules, can usually still be changed during peak by the team that owns them. Check that your freeze policy treats them as settings.
What is a Black Friday code freeze?
A code freeze is a period when a retailer stops releasing changes to its website and connected systems, usually from a few weeks before Black Friday until the holiday peak is over. It protects the site when traffic and order volumes are at their highest: fewer releases mean fewer chances of a change breaking checkout on the busiest days of the year. Urgent fixes usually still go through, with extra sign-off.
Start dates vary from one retailer to the next. Some teams lock the site in October, others in the week before Black Friday.
A freeze covers code: theme and template files, checkout integrations, new apps and plugins, platform upgrades. Whether it also covers your delivery and returns setup depends on where that setup is held and how your policy is written. A delivery rule hard-coded into your checkout is frozen with everything else. The same rule held in a delivery platform is a setting that your team can change on the day it's needed. Some freeze policies cover platform settings too, so agree which changes are allowed before November rather than during Black Week.
Why peak still needs changes after the freeze
Planning a freeze means deciding in October what November and December will need, and peak lasts longer than one weekend.
Black Week is the seven days around Black Friday, and most of the extra volume falls outside it. In 2025, 60% of the shipments above an average early-November week went out before or after Black Week. Around Black Friday itself, Black Week Saturday carried 4x the shipments of an ordinary Saturday, and Sunday 2.8x. Then the parcels come back: in nShift's 2024 data, returns peaked on 27 December at 49% above an average Friday.
nShift platform data
Black Friday 2025
2x
More than twice the shipments of an ordinary Friday in early November.
Black Week weekend
4x
an ordinary Saturday, and 2.8x an ordinary Sunday.
Where the extra shipments went
60%
of the shipments above an average early-November week went out before or after Black Week.
Source: nShift platform data, outbound shipments, 2025.
You give the discount on the day of the order. Shipping, delivery questions, returns, refunds and the carrier invoice are among the costs that follow over the next weeks, several of them after the sales figures have been reported. Some of those costs are fixed once the order is placed. Others still depend on choices you can make in November, and five of those choices need no release.
For the full peak data, week by week and market by market, see our Black Friday 2026 hub.
1. Schedule your Black Week delivery offer to start and end on its own
A free or discounted delivery offer for Black Week has to go live on the right morning and stop when the sale ends. If it depends on a release, it can't move during the freeze. If it depends on someone remembering to switch it off, it can stay live after the sale ends, and each extra day gives away shipping cost on full-price orders.
nShift Checkout handles a delivery offer as a rule: conditions such as basket value, market or delivery method, and a result, such as the price or which options show. Give the rule a date range and it applies only between those dates. In the Weather Warriors store, free shipping above €90 is a Checkout rule. A Black Week version can start on Monday 23 November and end after Cyber Monday on 30 November, without anyone switching it off.
If your campaign needs a different checkout setup altogether, use a scheduled connection change. It points your checkout at a campaign configuration for up to 14 days, then switches it back by itself.
2. Pause a carrier's delivery option when its service slips
At peak, a carrier can fall behind on one service or in one region. While its option stays in your checkout, shoppers keep choosing it, and the delay questions reach your customer service team once those parcels are late.
Disable that delivery option in the nShift Checkout settings and shoppers see the remaining options at checkout right away. When the carrier recovers, enable it again. Finnish retailer Stockmann gives its logistics team this control for its Crazy Days campaign: they can switch off a delivery method in about 30 seconds if a carrier encounters issues.
"Now, with nShift Checkout, we can manage the configuration ourselves: changing the order of carriers presented in our webshop or enabling/disabling carrier services within minutes, with all changes going live in our checkout."
Pasi Saastamoinen, Logistics Production Planner, Stockmann
A pause only helps if shoppers still have a good option left. Before Black Week, agree which carrier takes over on your busiest routes and make sure its delivery option already exists in Checkout, so the pause takes one decision on the day.
Spot a carrier falling behind before your customers do: our guide to carrier performance measurement.
3. Set your tracking alerts for the Black Friday weekend
Black Friday falls on 27 November this year, and the weekend straight after it closes Black Week. Many carriers don't scan parcels on Saturdays and Sundays. A missing-scan alert warns you when a parcel gets no new carrier scan within a set number of days. If that count includes the weekend, it can flag parcels that are only waiting for Monday, and your team starts the week chasing delays that aren't delays.
In nShift Track, Advanced notification profiles (the rules that decide which tracking messages go out, and when) have an Active days setting. Pick the weekdays your carriers operate, and the waiting time counts only those days, so the alerts waiting on Monday morning are the parcels that need attention. After peak, switch it back. New Advanced profiles start with Monday to Friday selected; existing profiles keep counting every day until you edit them, so check yours before the Black Friday weekend. Each profile can be filtered by carrier, so carriers that do scan on weekends can keep a seven-day profile of their own.
Missing updates also cost goodwill. Across more than 115,000 Nordic delivery ratings from December 2025, the negative comments clustered around delays, missing notifications and pickup points customers had not expected.
More on the setup behind proactive tracking updates: what happens when tracking goes quiet.
4. Give holiday gift orders a longer return window
A gift ordered on Black Friday may not be opened until Christmas Day. With a standard return window, it can stop being returnable before the person who received it has unwrapped it.
The Rule engine in nShift Returns sets return terms from conditions on the order, such as when it was placed or what it was worth. For gifts, a rule for orders created between 1 November and 24 December can set a longer return period. For our 5 November session, we set it to 90 days. In the Weather Warriors store, the period starts when the order is marked delivered, so an order delivered in mid-November stays returnable into February. Orders outside those dates keep your standard policy for that market.
How long should a holiday return window be? Work back from the latest date you want to accept a gift return. If the period starts at delivery, an order delivered on 12 November that should still be returnable in mid-January needs about 60 days. Your holiday window comes on top of the law: in the EU, shoppers can withdraw from an online purchase within 14 days of receiving it under the Consumer Rights Directive, whatever your own policy says.
Getting ready for the returns that follow peak: January returns, and why post-peak logistics starts now.
5. Make returns free on larger Black Week baskets
Discounts are the point of Black Week, and of the situations IMRG asked shoppers about, discounted items are where they are least willing to pay a return fee. In The Ecommerce Returns Opportunity, IMRG's 2026 research for nShift, 47.6% of 1,000 UK shoppers said a return charge is fair for customers who return often. For sale or discounted items, only 14.8% agreed, the lowest of the four situations they were asked about.
They check before they buy, too. In the same survey, 85.6% said the returns policy is important when they decide to buy online, and in DHL's 2026 E-Commerce Trends Report, seven in ten shoppers say they will abandon a purchase when the delivery or returns options they want are missing at checkout.
IMRG research for nShift, 2026
Sale or discounted items
14.8%
of UK shoppers think a return charge is fair on sale or discounted items, the lowest of the four situations they were asked about.
Frequent returners
47.6%
think a return charge is fair for customers who return often.
Before they buy
85.6%
say the returns policy is important when they decide to buy online.
Source: IMRG for nShift, The Ecommerce Returns Opportunity, 2026. Survey of 1,000 UK consumers.
With a single returns policy, a €40 Black Friday order and a €300 one get the same terms. A rule lets you treat them differently. Set orders of €200 or more to return free, with the return fee and the return shipping fee at zero, and smaller orders keep your standard fee. The rule reads order value, not what is in the basket, so pick the threshold where waiving the fee is worth it on your margins. On 5 November we pair it with the Weather Warriors store's €90 free-shipping threshold at checkout, so a shopper who spends €200 or more gets free delivery and free returns.
Each rule applies to the markets you select, and separately to each flow: returns, exchanges, or claims for faulty and damaged items. Rules are checked from the top of the list down, so when two rules could apply, the higher one decides. They can also use custom fields sent with the order, such as a customer group.
More rule examples, from campaign windows to terms for a customer group: charging for returns without charging everyone.
What to finish before your freeze starts
Some peak work does need a release or a long lead time. Get it done while your site is still open for changes:
- Connect any carrier or service you may need at peak.
- Agree daily pickup volumes with each carrier for your busiest days.
- Finish integration and checkout changes that touch your site's code.
- Send any custom fields your return rules will use, such as customer group, with the order data.
- Load-test checkout if your campaigns concentrate orders into minutes.
Your peak change calendar for 2026
| When | What to set or check |
|---|---|
| Before your freeze | Carriers and delivery options, integrations, custom fields for return rules, checkout load test |
| Early November | Gift return rule (orders 1 November to 24 December) and the order-value rule for free returns |
| By Friday 20 November | Black Week delivery offer, dated 23 to 30 November |
| Black Week, 23 to 29 November | Active days on your tracking alert profiles for the weekend of 28 and 29 November; daily carrier checks |
| Black Friday, 27 November, and Cyber Monday, 30 November | In 2025, Cyber Monday carried 8% more shipments than Black Friday on nShift's platform |
| Early December | Active days back to your normal setting |
| The week after Christmas | Expect the returns peak: in 2024 it came on 27 December |
See the changes live on 5 November
In Solved episode 6: Peak on your terms, Sophie and I follow one Black Friday order through Weather Warriors. You'll see it placed at checkout with a dated Black Week offer already live, a carrier's option paused and restored, the parcel shipped and tracked with the weekend alert settings, and the order returned under the holiday rules, with one rule built live and one prepared earlier. Every change is a setting in nShift.
- When: Thursday 5 November, 12pm GMT / 1pm CET
- How long: 30 minutes, live on Zoom
- Bonus: when you register, we send you The Ecommerce Returns Opportunity, IMRG's research for nShift on what 1,000 UK shoppers expect from returns
Who gets the most from this session
- Ecommerce managers and heads of ecommerce who own the peak plan and the margin that follows it
- Customer experience and returns managers getting ready for the returns that arrive after Christmas
- Operations and logistics managers responsible for dispatch and delivery communication at peak volume
- Ecommerce directors weighing returns policy against conversion
Try the demo store before the session
Weather Warriors is open at demo.nshift.com. Place an order and you'll see nShift Checkout's delivery options and pickup-point map, the tracking for your parcel and the returns flow, the same journey we follow on 5 November. Bring your own peak scenario and ask us about it live.
