Hugo Galvao de Franca Filho treats the weeks before Black Friday as more decisive than the day itself. In his experience, most of the outcomes people associate with the sale itself, whether that is a smooth week of record orders or a string of stockouts and delivery complaints, were actually decided much earlier, in the planning stretch that gets far less attention than the event.
By the time the promotion goes live, the forecasting, staffing and logistics decisions have already been made, and there is little room left to fix a weak plan on the fly. Here is a practical way to spend that preparation window for a pet e-commerce operation.
Forecast demand for specific products, not just overall volume
The instinct during Black Friday planning is often to ask how much total volume to expect. The more useful question is which specific products are likely to sell out first, since stockouts do measurable damage to a customer relationship rather than just costing one sale. A meaningful share of shoppers say running out of stock actively hurts their experience with a store, and the effect compounds with repetition: after a first stockout, most simply pick a substitute, but after three, a large majority abandon the brand altogether.
For a pet business, this means building forecasts around the specific bags of food, litter and supplements that customers already reorder on a predictable cycle, rather than treating every item in the catalog as equally likely to move. Hugo Galvao de Franca Filho comments that those are the products where running out costs the most in future loyalty, not just current revenue.
Lock in delivery capacity before volume spikes, not after
Delivery performance during a sales peak tends to matter more to customers than the discount that got them to buy in the first place. A large majority of buyers say they are unlikely to purchase from a business again after a bad delivery experience, and complaints about delayed deliveries have historically made up a disproportionate share of consumer complaints during Brazil’s peak shopping weeks.
Confirming carrier capacity, agreeing on realistic delivery windows and deciding in advance how heavier items like large food bags will be packed and routed matters more than any last-minute promotion. Hugo Galvao signals that a pet business that promises fast delivery it cannot actually sustain during a volume spike does more damage than one that sets honest expectations from the start.
Prepare customer service for a message spike, not a steady trickle
Customer questions and order-tracking requests do not arrive evenly during a sales peak. Message volume on channels like WhatsApp can multiply several times over within a single day once a sale goes live, which overwhelms a team sized for normal traffic almost immediately. Setting up automated responses for the most common questions, like order status and stock availability, ahead of time frees up a human team to focus on the more sensitive conversations that actually need a personal touch.
Hugo Galvao argues that testing this system before the sale starts, rather than during the first wave of messages, is what separates a smooth peak period from a backlog that takes days to clear.
Treat it as a recurring project, not a one-time event
The businesses that perform most consistently during peak sales periods tend to be the ones that review what happened afterward and build those lessons directly into the next cycle, rather than starting from scratch each year. Which products sold out, which delivery promises held up, and where customer service fell behind are all questions worth answering honestly once the dust settles, since the answers become next year’s preparation checklist.
A pet e-commerce operation, concludes Hugo Galvao de Franca Filho, that treats its busiest week as a recurring discipline, rather than an annual scramble, tends to arrive at each one noticeably better prepared than the one before it.
