How to watch your Shopify store during Black Friday
Shopify builds one screen for exactly this moment. Live View reads sessions, sales, and orders in real time, and Shopify's own documentation names Black Friday and Cyber Monday as the reason it exists.
On Cyber Monday 2025, the day before Shopify's own release bragged about a record $14.6 billion weekend, its admin and point-of-sale logins went down for about five hours. Checkout stayed up. Nobody who needed to open an order or kill a broken discount could get in.
Admin access and being open aren't the same thing
Shopify's BFCM 2025 numbers are real: $14.6 billion in sales over the weekend, up 27% on the year before, more than 94,900 stores having their best-ever day. That release went out on 2 December. The day before it, Shopify's own admin, login, and point-of-sale systems went down for roughly five hours. Reports peaked around 4,000 outages mid-morning. Checkout kept running the whole time. What didn't: logging in to edit a product, manage an order, or adjust a discount.
It wasn't the first time. A near-identical pattern hit in December 2022, the same week, a different year: checkout failing for some stores, pages not loading, third-party APIs unable to connect, orders going missing. None of it traced back to a third-party app.
Neither event says Shopify is unreliable most of the year. Both say the same thing about this specific week: the busiest hour of your year is also a plausible hour to lose the login you'd use to react to it.
What Shopify already puts in front of you
Live View, inside Shopify Analytics, covers visitors active in the last five minutes, total sales, sessions and orders since midnight, top products and locations on a live map, and a ten-minute read on carts, checkouts in progress, and completed purchases.
Shopify Status tracks nine systems separately: Admin, Checkout, Storefront, Point of Sale, and five more. Log in once and it shows your store specifically, not only the global feed, which is the difference between knowing your store is fine and guessing from a page that covers every store on the platform.
| What you'd want to know | Automatic | What to set up first |
|---|---|---|
| Live sessions, sales, top products | Yes, in Live View | Nothing, just open it |
| Whether any part of Shopify is down | Yes, on Shopify Status | Log in once so it's specific to your store |
| A new order comes in | Yes, if push notifications are on | Turn them on in the Shopify app |
| A product is about to sell out | No, not for an online store | Build a Shopify Flow workflow on the low-stock trigger |
What needs setting up before the day, not during it
Low-stock alerting isn't automatic for a normal online catalog. Shopify's built-in version runs as a daily digest. For everything else, the real mechanism is a Shopify Flow workflow on the low-stock trigger, and it only helps if it's built before the traffic arrives, not while you're watching a product sell out.
The other thing worth deciding now: which two changes are actually worth making live, and which aren't. A rule edited at the busiest hour of the year is a rule nobody tested at that hour. Write the two down, and leave everything else alone once the sale starts.
What doesn't need watching at all
Checkout stayed up through the December 2025 outage. Admin didn't. That split matters more than it sounds: search, filters, bundles, and the cart all render on the storefront, not the admin, so an offer you already tested and froze in the rehearsal keeps serving a shopper whether or not you can log in that hour.
Back in Stock's notify button works the same way without you touching it. The moment a product sells out, a shopper can ask to hear when it's back, on the product page, the collection card, search results, or instant search. Nothing needs your attention for that to happen. And on the Ultimate plan, a Growth Intelligence finding can reach you the moment it's ready, by SMS, Telegram, or Slack, instead of waiting for Monday's email, a faster read on a revenue opportunity, not a site-health alert.
Before the day starts, have these settled
- Live View is open, or bookmarked where you'll actually look.
- You've logged into Shopify Status once, so it reads your store, not the whole platform.
- Push notifications are on in the Shopify app.
- A Shopify Flow workflow covers low stock on anything likely to sell out.
- The two things you'll change live are named, and everything else is off-limits.
- Every offer running today was tested and frozen last week, not built today.
- You know which findings channel you're on, Monday's email or something faster.
Questions, answered
How do I watch my Shopify store in real time during Black Friday?
Open Analytics, then Live View. It shows visitors active in the last five minutes, total sales, sessions and orders since midnight, top products and locations, and a ten-minute read on active carts, checkouts in progress, and completed purchases. Shopify's own documentation names Black Friday and Cyber Monday as exactly when it's meant to be used.
How do I check if Shopify is down?
Open Shopify Status and log in once so it shows your store specifically, not only the global status. It tracks Admin, Checkout, Storefront, Point of Sale, and five other systems separately, so you can tell whether the part that's affected is the part you're using.
Does Shopify alert me when a product is about to sell out?
Not by default, for an online store. Shopify's built-in low-stock alert runs as a daily digest rather than an instant one. For a general online catalog, real alerting needs a Shopify Flow workflow built on the low-stock trigger, set up before the sale, not during it.
What happened during the Shopify outage on Cyber Monday 2025?
Shopify's admin, login, and point-of-sale systems went down for roughly five hours on 1 December 2025, the day before Shopify's own press release reported a record $14.6 billion BFCM weekend. Checkout kept working. Stores couldn't log in to edit products, manage orders, or adjust discounts until the evening. A near-identical pattern showed up again in December 2022.
Can Sledge alert me the moment something needs attention?
Growth Intelligence findings normally arrive in a weekly email. On the Ultimate plan, a finding can reach you the moment it's ready instead, by SMS, Telegram, or Slack. That's a faster read on a revenue opportunity Growth Intelligence has already found, not a live alert about site uptime or checkout errors, Sledge doesn't monitor those.
What should I actually watch while my Black Friday sale is live?
Less than it feels like. Live View and Shopify Status cover whether the store is up and what's selling. Order and low-stock notifications, set up beforehand, cover the rest. Everything you froze and rehearsed the week before doesn't need watching at all, it just needs to be left alone.
What you can't log into, you can't fix.
Install free. On a paid plan, a Growth Intelligence finding can reach you the moment it's ready, by SMS, Telegram, or Slack on Ultimate, instead of waiting for Monday's email. Every plan gets the same findings, each with a dollar estimate, from your own orders and from published research on what changes like these earn.
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