Beyond Black Friday: A Checklist to Keep Your Checkout Stable Through Christmas

We're deep into peak shopping season. Between now and New Year's Day, your site will face sustained traffic spikes, last-minute Christmas shoppers, and the Boxing Day/New Year sales frenzy that follows.

This is the nightmare scenario that keeps e-commerce teams up at night during the holiday season. When checkout breaks during peak traffic, you're not just losing sales, you're losing customer trust. Customers who face payment friction won't wait around; they'll compare prices at a competitor's site and complete their purchase there in seconds.

But don’t worry. Most holiday season payment disasters are preventable, as the problem isn't a lack of solutions; it's a lack of preparation. This holiday season checklist will help you avoid payment failures and boost sales by keeping your checkout running smoothly when traffic spikes.

By the end of this guide, you'll have a clear action plan to prepare your payment infrastructure using Flutterwave. Each item includes specific implementation steps you can complete before the holiday arrives, along with validation checks to confirm you're truly ready.

Before You Start: Prerequisites

This checklist assumes you already have Flutterwave integrated into your checkout. If you're new to Flutterwave or haven't integrated yet, start with the Quick Start Guide to get your basic payment flow working for your existing customers, then come back here to prepare for the holiday season traffic.

Note: This implementation uses the Flutterwave v3 API.

Your Holiday Season Sales Checklist

1. Offer Global Payment Methods for Holiday Gifting
During the holidays, people aren't just buying for themselves; they are buying gifts for family across borders. A customer in the UK might be buying for family in Kenya, or someone in Lagos might be shopping on a US site. If you only accept local cards, you block these international holiday sales. Flutterwave supports cards, bank transfers, mobile money (M-Pesa, MTN Mobile Money, and more), across multiple countries.

See the full list of supported payment methods.

Missing payment methods becomes critical during high-traffic periods because customers won’t wait; they’ll find alternatives, abandon their cart, and shop elsewhere.

How To Solve This With Flutterwave

• Audit your current payment methods: Log into your Flutterwave dashboard and review which payment channels you have enabled. Go to “Settings” → “Business preference” → “Payment methods.”
  

• Enable region-specific methods: For Nigerian customers, activate USSD, bank transfer, and QR codes. For East African markets, confirm mobile money is enabled for Kenya (M-PESA), Uganda, Ghana, Zambia, Rwanda, and Tanzania.

• Configure your checkout: When integrating via API, specify which payment methods to display:
  

    FlutterwaveCheckout({
      public_key: 'YOUR_PUBLIC_KEY', // stored in a .env
      payment_options: 'card, banktransfer, mobilemoneyghana, ussd, qr',
      // ... other config
    })

Payment methods are tied to specific currencies; for instance, M-Pesa is only available for KES, so Flutterwave automatically filters unavailable options based on the transaction currency.

2. Speed Up Checkout for Repeat Holiday Shoppers
Holiday shopping is rarely a one-time event. Customers who have shopped with you before expect a one-click experience. Forcing them to find and re-enter their card details adds friction that will send them to a competitor.

How To Solve This With Flutterwave
Here are some ways you can speed up checkout for returning customers with Flutterwave:

Save payment details for returning customers:
Flutterwave offers some approaches to reduce checkout friction:

• Tokenization: Securely save a customer's card details after their first purchase, so they can check out with a single click.
• Card-on-File (CoF): Store customer cards with enhanced security and compliance for recurring or future payments.

Other ways to speed up checkout:

• Optimize your checkout UI: Pre-fill customer information when possible and minimize required fields.
• Use Payment Links for quick checkouts: Create payment links with QR codes that customers can scan to make payments quickly.

3. Run Load Tests Before Promotions Go Live
Your payment integration might work perfectly under normal load, but collapse when 1,000 customers try to check out simultaneously during the holiday season’s promotions. Load testing reveals bottlenecks before they become disasters, identifying issues like database connection limits, API timeout configurations, or webhook processing delays that only surface under stress.

How To Solve This With Flutterwave

1. Switch to test mode: Toggle to the test environment in your Flutterwave dashboard to run tests without processing real transactions.
   

2. Simulate peak load: Use load testing tools (JMeter, k6, Artillery) to simulate 10x your normal traffic. Create test scenarios that:

   • Process 100+ simultaneous payments
   • Mix different payment methods
   • Include payment failures and retries

3. Use test cards for payment scenarios: Flutterwave provides test cards to simulate different payment scenarios:

   • Successful payment: Use visa card 4187427415564246
   • Failed payments: Use card 5258585922666506
   • Insufficient funds scenarios: Use the appropriate test cards from Flutterwave's test card documentation

4. Test webhook handling: Simulate webhook delays and failures to confirm your system handles them gracefully.

5. Monitor response times: Your payment initiation should complete in under two seconds, even at peak load.

4. Wire Up Webhooks to Handle Asynchronous Holiday Traffic
Webhooks are especially useful for asynchronous payment methods like bank transfers, where you won't know when payments are completed unless your payment gateway notifies you. During the holiday season sales, if your webhook endpoint fails, you won't know about successful payments, leaving customers in limbo and support teams scrambling.

How To Solve This With Flutterwave

1. Configure webhooks in the dashboard:
   • Navigate to Settings → Webhooks.
   • Add your webhook URL (must be publicly accessible).
   • Enable "Enable Webhook retries" and "Enable webhook for failed transactions" options.
   • Save your configuration.

• Verify webhook signatures: Always verify the signature using the verif-hash header to confirm requests come from Flutterwave, not attackers sending fake payment confirmations.
• Handle retries properly: If your webhook endpoint returns an error, Flutterwave retries up to three times with 30-minute intervals between attempts. Make your webhook processing idempotent so these retries don't cause duplicate orders.
• Respond quickly: Your webhook URL needs to respond within a certain time limit, or Flutterwave will consider it a failure and retry. Avoid long-running tasks in your webhook endpoint.

Learn more about setting up webhooks properly in this guide.

5. Configure Your System for High-Volume Traffic

Holiday traffic comes in waves. You might see a spike at midnight for a flash sale, and another at noon. If your payment infrastructure can't scale, customers will see timeout errors or stuck loading screens right when they're trying to give you money.

How To Solve This With Flutterwave

• Configure checkout timeouts: Set session_duration to limit completion time for each payment, and configure max_retry to prevent users from making too many attempts for failed transactions.

    FlutterwaveCheckout({
      // ... other config
      configuration: {
        "session_duration": 35
      },
      max_retry_attempt: 5,
    })

• Scale your webhook handlers: Your webhook processing should be able to handle 100+ webhooks per minute without backing up.
• Use connection pooling: Configure proper database connection limits to prevent exhaustion during traffic spikes.
• Set up auto-scaling: If you're on cloud infrastructure (AWS, GCP, Azure), configure auto-scaling for your payment processing services.

6. Set Refund and Chargeback Playbooks
Holiday season sales generates higher-than-normal refund and chargeback volumes due to rushed purchases, shipping delays, and increased fraud attempts.

Never refund a transaction that's already in the chargeback process. If you do, the customer gets paid twice: once from your refund and once when the chargeback is completed. You need clear playbooks to prevent this.

How To Solve This With Flutterwave
For refunds:

• Document your refund approval process (who approves, under what conditions).
• Train your team on how to log a refund via Dashboard (Dashboard → Transactions → Refunds) and API.
• Set up email notifications for refund requests.

For chargebacks:

• Check out Flutterwave’s chargebacks documentation.
• Prepare evidence templates (proof of delivery, service logs, terms of service).
• Assign someone to monitor chargeback notifications.
• Remember: You have 48 hours to respond with evidence.
• Never refund a transaction that's already a chargeback (customer gets paid twice).

7. Enable Split Payments (For Marketplaces)

Suppose you run a marketplace or work with vendors; manually calculating and distributing payments after the holiday season sales is slow and error-prone. Split payments automatically divide incoming payments between your account and vendor accounts, settling funds based on your configuration, which is important when processing thousands of transactions.

How To Solve This With Flutterwave
Create subaccounts for vendors:
You can set up subaccounts through the dashboard or programmatically via API:

Via Dashboard:

• Dashboard: Click "Subaccounts" → “Subaccounts” → "Add subaccount"
  

• Enter bank details, set split type (percentage or flat), and define split value for default commission rules.
  

Via API
For automated vendor onboarding or managing multiple subaccounts programmatically, use the Subaccounts API to create and configure splits.

Flutterwave automatically splits the incoming payment at the point of transaction. The vendor (subaccount) gets their share, and the marketplace (main account) gets its commission, all deposited into the correct accounts instantly and automatically. This automates the entire payout and reconciliation process.

You can learn more about split payments and subaccounts in the documentation

8. Create a Payment Monitoring Dashboard
You can't fix what you can't see. During the holiday season sales, you need real-time visibility into payment health to catch problems before they become catastrophes. A spike in failed payments or webhook errors needs immediate attention, not discovery after the fact.

How To Solve This With Flutterwave

1. Set up metrics collection: Track these key indicators:
   • Payment initiation success rate
   • Payment completion rate by method
   • Webhook delivery success rate
   • Average payment processing time
   • Failed payment reasons (by error code)
2. Use Flutterwave's dashboard: Monitor transactions in real-time through the transactions page on your dashboard.
3. Set up on-call rotation: Assign team members to monitor sales during peak holiday season hours.
4. Prepare troubleshooting playbooks: Document what to do when each alert fires.

Final Thoughts

This checklist gives you everything you need to prepare, but you have to put in the work to prepare your system ahead of the holiday. Start working through these items today. The time you invest now in proper testing, configuration, and monitoring will pay for itself many times over when your checkout keeps humming while competitors are scrambling to fix broken payments.

Make this holiday season your biggest revenue day. Your infrastructure is ready, so make sure you are too.

Need help getting your payment infrastructure ready for the holiday season? Sign up for Flutterwave.