Worst-case scenarios: How Martech platforms can avoid BFCM nightmares

There’s a lot of pressure during Black Friday and Cyber Monday (BFCM). All too often, the pressure finds its way back to the platforms helping brands deliver important messages. 

Shoppers are under pressure to snatch up the best deals before time or inventory runs out. Retailers are under pressure to earn attention and drive sales. But the people at Martechs might feel more pressure than anyone else. 

Behind all those bargains and Cyber Week campaigns are billions of customer communications that support everything from marketing promotions to order confirmations and one-time passwords (OTPs). 

Black Friday and the holidays are peak sending season. If something happens to those messages, it’s the CRMs, CEPs, customer support, and ecommerce platforms that could be on the receiving end of the blame. That’s understandable. BFCM is a big deal. 

We probably don’t need to mention this, but the main reason the pressure is on during BFCM is that there’s a lot of money to be made (and everyone wants their share). 

Last year, ecommerce sales in the U.S. reached more than $241 billion – an 8.7% increase from the previous year. That’s online sales only, and those numbers are expected to increase in 2025. The National Retail Federation (NRF) says overall 2025 retail sales will grow between 2.7% and 3.7% despite lingering economic concerns like inflation and tariffs. 

While retailers are serving their customers, Martech platforms are focused on serving their users too. Whether it’s a big-name brand or a small business, people depend on these platforms to help them send engaging campaigns and customer notifications via mobile messaging and email. 

Speaking of those channels, sales aren’t the only thing expected to grow in 2025. Look for an ongoing increase in the volume of messages sent during Black Friday and beyond. Sinch’s BFCM numbers from last year back that up. 

As that trend continues, the onus is on Martech platforms to provide reliable ways for their users to connect with consumers during the busiest shopping season. That’s why we’ve identified some of the most common reasons BFCM nightmares come true with other cloud communication providers.  

Don’t want to lose sleep after eating turkey and pumpkin pie this year? Check out these worst-case scenarios and advice for avoiding a BFCM disaster. These come from stories we’ve heard from customers who switched to Sinch after a bad experience. 

You know email and messaging volumes are going to surge during Black Friday and Cyber Monday, but do you know how much? 

Underestimating those volume spikes is a real risk. Platforms that don’t model for holiday peaks may hit throughput bottlenecks. Queues grow, processing slows, and scheduled sends back up. Latency that goes unnoticed in normal conditions suddenly becomes minutes or hours of waiting when volume doubles or triples. 

You might think you can simply “send more” if needed. That may be true, depending on your partner, but you still need to provide forecasts. If there are unexpected spikes, you could incur overages, experience throttling, delays, or even have messages rejected. 

As Sinch’s Alex Rubin explains, forecasting errors can also cascade downstream. 

Start with forecasting and modeling. Use historical BFCM data to project outbound volumes, then factor in inbound at 2–3x. Build scenarios for both email and messaging, since each has different choke points. 

Next, share those forecasts with your infrastructure provider. They can coordinate with carriers to secure the capacity you’ll need. Without that visibility, providers and carriers can’t plan ahead. So, your traffic is more likely to be throttled, and you’re more likely to incur overages. 

Run stress tests to simulate projected loads across your APIs, queues, and webhooks.   Your communication partners should be running those stress tests (Sinch does), and so should your platform. Note: Stress tests can often be performed without actually incurring volume charges or sending real messages. 

Include inbound receipts and retries in the test data to validate end-to-end performance. Finally, set internal guardrails. Configure rate limits and traffic-shaping rules so that if demand spikes past your forecast, the platform sheds load gracefully instead of collapsing under pressure. 

Sure, promotional messages drive sales. But as important as marketing is during the holidays, transactional messages that fail to arrive in a timely manner can be an even bigger nightmare for your users than a lackluster BFCM campaign. 

Sinch surveyed consumers ahead of Black Friday 2025 and found 93% call transactional messages important during the holiday shopping season. Plus, almost 76% of online shoppers expect to receive order confirmations within five minutes of making a purchase. 

Transactional messages also include communications the let people log into their accounts. 

A potential Black Friday disaster that could stem from a failure to plan for increased volumes involves delayed delivery of one-time passwords. The following is based on a true story of what happened to a Martech before switching to Sinch. 

An ecommerce platform started getting bombarded with calls from upset users during BFCM. Retailers using the platform noticed one-time passwords (OTPs) weren’t reaching their customers. That meant consumers couldn’t log in to their accounts to shop and make purchases. Angry shoppers led to angry brands, which led to stressed out Martech support reps, damage to the platform’s reputation, and lots of missed revenue for its users.  

Alex says this could be an even bigger problem if your platform has service-level agreements (SLAs) that guarantee specifics around speedy delivery. Fall short of the agreement and you could be paying out SLA credits to users. 

The best defense is traffic separation. Route transactional traffic, such as OTPs, login codes, and order confirmations, through dedicated queues or priority lanes. That way, even if marketing campaigns flood the pipes, time-sensitive messages keep moving. 

From an email deliverability perspective, high-volume senders on your platform should be using different sending IPs or subdomains for commercial and transactional email traffic. This separates sender reputation and helps keep important customer updates from landing in spam. 

Next, validate your SLA commitments. If you have certain commitments, confirm with your infrastructure provider that you have the capacity to meet them under peak load. Their SLA needs to reflect and support yours. 

Finally, align with your provider on failover. If one route slows down or a carrier link gets congested, you need assurance that traffic can be rerouted automatically.  

Your users will be keeping a close eye on sales as well as campaign performance during Black Friday and Cyber Week. If they can’t see what’s happening (in near real-time), there’s a very good chance they will freak out. 

When inbound events pile up, webhook resilience can become a chokepoint. Delivery receipts, bounces, complaints, replies and other inbound events generate 2–3x the volume of outbound sends. During BFCM, that multiplier translates into a flood of inbound events. If your webhooks can’t keep up, data gets delayed or dropped. 

What that means is data doesn’t flow into your platform for users to see on reporting dashboards. Alex says this can cause unnecessary stress for people when they’re trusting you to reassure them their Black Friday plans are going just fine. 

First, ensure your webhooks are properly configured before BFCM. Expect inbound volumes to multiply and confirm queues, retries, and ensure throughput can absorb the load. 

Second, build in resilience. Implement retry logic with exponential backoff so if a customer’s endpoint is slow or unavailable, events aren’t lost. Provide delivery confirmations so users know the data got through. 

Finally, document clearly. Give your users guidance on what to expect from webhook behavior during high-traffic windows. Clear documentation and communication can prevent misunderstandings and reassure them that your platform is in control. 

While brands are depending on the platforms of their choice, those Martechs are depending on API providers that enable email sending and mobile messaging for their customers. If the APIs aren’t reliable, your users will see you as the unreliable one. 

The risk here is dependency. A single point of failure at the infrastructure level can cascade into delayed campaigns, missing messages, and frustrated end users. If your API provider suffers an outage or even a slowdown during BFCM, your customers won’t blame the provider. They’ll blame you. 

The stakes are even higher if downtime overlaps with the busiest hours of online shopping. Missed opportunities during Black Friday aren’t recoverable later. And it’s not only about outages. Partial failures are just as dangerous. Increased latency, throttling, or regional carrier disruptions can erode user trust in ways that are harder to measure but just as damaging. 

The first step is to evaluate your provider’s reliability. Review uptime history, latency performance, and published SLAs. Past reliability is the best predictor of holiday resilience. 

Second, establish redundancy and failover options. Work with your provider to confirm traffic can be rerouted across regions or carrier connections if needed.  

Third, develop escalation plans. Document when to escalate (e.g., after 5 minutes of elevated latency), what information must be shared, and how to update customers. Plans should also include communication templates, so updates go out quickly under pressure.  

Finally, define clear escalation paths. Who’s responsible? Map out exactly who deals with issues at each level – from frontline support, to engineering, to your provider’s Network Operations Center (NOC). The clearer the handoffs, the faster an incident can be contained. 

Even the best platforms rely on infrastructure partners for email and mobile message delivery. When something breaks at scale during Black Friday or Cyber Week, your team may need immediate help from your API provider.  

The nightmare scenario? You open a ticket or call for support, but no one is there. Worse yet… There’s nobody with the right expertise to help fix the problem.  

True story… We work with a Martech that switched to Sinch after their old API partner brought in a brand new technical account manager (TAM) just days before peak sending season. 

If your provider doesn’t respond ASAP, your platform is effectively stranded. Outages or delays drag on longer, and your users keep refreshing dashboards with no answers. The frustration rolls downhill. Your platform’s users see you as unresponsive, even though the bottleneck may be outside your control. 

Support gaps can also delay escalation to the people who can fix the problem. If your partner’s support reps lack direct lines of communication with engineering or the NOC, that means it could take a lot longer to reach a resolution.  

During BFCM, that delay translates directly into lost revenue for your users and lost credibility for your platform. 

Start by evaluating responsiveness, not just SLAs. An SLA might promise uptime credits, but that won’t help you in the middle of a live incident. Ask your provider how quickly a human expert will respond to a critical ticket during BFCM, and whether that support is staffed 24/7. 

Second, check for expertise at the first touch. Some providers front-load support with generalists who log tickets but can’t solve them. For a Martech platform, that’s a waste of time. Look for partners who route critical issues directly to engineers or deliverability specialists with the authority to act. 

Finally, review communication practices. Trustworthy providers maintain real-time status pages and commit to proactive updates during incidents. If you’re left refreshing inboxes for hours, you can’t keep your own customers informed. 

We sincerely hope this BFCM season will be a dream come true – not a nightmare. 

However, once the last message is sent and we turn the calendar page to 2026, it’s a good time to look back at how it all went. Where could you improve before peak sending season rolls around next year? What did you learn? 

Sinch is hosting a BFCM post-mortem event. Not the kind of post-mortem where you examine a dead body… the kind where you analyze what happened following a big event. And what’s bigger than Black Friday? 

You’ll hear from Sinch experts, including Alex Rubin, as we take a closer look at some of the horrific scenarios Martechs must avoid during peak sending seasons. Joining Alex will be Global Head of Technical Account Management, Romain Deruffe, as well as Cameron Henry – one of Sinch’s email deliverability experts. 

We even brought some of these horror stories to life in a series of “scary” movie trailers. Check them out, sign up to attend, and reserve your seat. 

Register Now

While consumers are counting on retailers for exciting deals, brands are counting on your platform to help them connect and communicate. So, who are you counting on this time of year? 

To help you and your platform with BFCM readiness, we compiled a checklist that addresses the scenarios detailed in this article as well as other things to double check before Black Friday. Download the checklist below for free – no form required. 

Interested in learning more about how Sinch’s APIs let platforms white label sending for email, mobile messaging, verifications, and voice communication? Check out our page with info for Martechs and get in touch with us soon.