After a while, you start to notice the same patterns repeat every peak season. Different brands, different teams, same stress points.

This is not a neat list of things to look for. It is more like a set of patterns I have seen at e-commerce brands, marketplaces, and agencies when everything ramps up for a peak season like Black Friday and the weeks around it.

I think about them in four categories: operations, margin, systems and founder psychology.

Every year, the same weak spots get tested: fulfilment bottlenecks, agency fatigue, unrealistic promotion plans, cash crunch from over ordering or under ordering, poor forecasting… I have seen this from the inside. One season, everything looked ready. Promotions set, media live, ads performing, orders coming in even faster than expected. On the surface, it felt like a success.

Underneath, the fulfilment centre was under strain. We were selling more than we could physically handle. Orders could not be shipped at the speed customers were expecting. To catch up, we spent more on operations, extra shifts, and fixes. That extra cost quietly ate into margin. We hit the revenue target but not the profit we could have had. There was also a missed opportunity. Looking back, a better provisioning against the forecast could have handled that volume more gracefully.

I have also seen the opposite. Big spend in the lead up to peak season, cautious stock decisions, all the build up and then the results land well below expectations. Money goes out, but not enough comes back.

Promotions can create their own problems. Complex offers look clever on paper but confuse customers in practice. If people have to think too hard to understand a deal, many of them simply do not buy. That complexity costs creative time, slows the site experience, and rarely pays back.

On the agency side, last minute change requests are another stress signal. Some changes are necessary, others are reactions to nerves. When they pile up mid season, agencies stretch their teams, absorb extra work that is not priced in, and feel the fatigue. It hits quality and margin at the same time.

The second pattern is what quietly kills profit while everyone is looking at the top line: the rising customer acquisition costs, discount addiction, high number of products and services, weak retention and ad spend that does not match reality.

Higher acquisition costs are not news to anyone. Ad platforms and tools are more expensive than ever and more crowded than they used to be. If a brand leans too heavily on one channel and treats it as the only engine, margin suffers across the year, not just in Q4.

Discounts and promotions are another double edged tool. They can be useful, but when they become the default move, they slowly change how customers see the brand. People start to wait for the sale or only buy when there is a code. The brand identity shifts and margin erodes at the same time. A business that lives on constant promotions trains customers to expect lower prices and makes it harder to keep healthy numbers per order.

Too many SKUs are another quiet killer. More choice is often sold as a positive but in practice, it can slow decision making and spread attention too thin. For brands, it becomes harder to know what to push and what to let go of. For agencies that serve them, having a long, unclear list of services creates the same issue. When an offer is not simple to understand, it is harder to sell and harder to price properly.

Quite often peak seasons reveal where tech and process are not ready: Manual tasks that collapse under volume, tracking and attribution chaos, data that people do not trust or even  infrastructure that cracks under load.

Good decisions rely on good data. If your numbers are inconsistent or hard to trust, every choice becomes slower and more emotional. I have been in situations where the question was always, "Do we have the right metrics to make this call?" When the answer is "not really," people fall back on gut feeling. Sometimes that works. Often it does not, hence the importance of understanding and having the right metrics in general.

Infrastructure matters too. One year, we had a large spike in traffic at peak time. On the surface, it looked like a win. Underneath, the platform started to struggle. Page loads slowed, parts of the site misbehaved and in some cases customers could not complete orders smoothly. The worst part was that we only noticed the full extent of it when customers started to complain.. By then, some sales were already lost.

A few seconds of delay at checkout can cost a lot of money. When people are in a buying mood and ready to pay, any friction you add is a direct hit to revenue and profit. It also leaves a mark on how they see the brand.

Even for experienced operators, peak season comes with pressure. There is a fear of doing too little and missing out and a fear of doing too much and burning cash or people. There is a desire to hit a record, to prove that this year is better than last year.

That pressure can lead to shifting targets mid season. A number that was fine in planning suddenly does not feel ambitious enough once the first good day arrives. Spend changes, promotions change, expectations on the team change. Focus shifts from "What is best for the business, the team and the customers?" to "Can we push this higher, just because the graph looks good?"

The result is often emotional fatigue and  teams feel pulled into constant urgency. Founders tie their sense of success to a small window of big revenue weeks. When the dust settles, the numbers might look fine, but people are worn out.

Across these seasons, a few things keep showing up:

If you run an e commerce brand or digital agency and some of these patterns feel familiar, I would love to hear more about your experience.

Thanks for reading,

Jordan