Checkout is the one part of your store where a fault costs you the whole order.
Black Friday 2026 is 27 November and Cyber Week runs to 3 December, so checkout work should be finished and frozen by mid-November.
Most BFCM checkout failures are discount-logic failures, not infrastructure failures — the platform scales, your offer combinations do not.
Accelerated checkout buttons bypass parts of the cart, so every offer must be tested through Shop Pay and the wallet buttons, not just the standard flow.
A freeze date is the highest-value thing on this list, because a change shipped without observation time is the one that breaks the weekend.
Shopify's own infrastructure handles peak traffic and it is not a useful thing for a merchant to worry about.
The full guide has the formats, the deadlines and the worked examples.