Peak Event Readiness Checklist

Ecommerce incident management · Use in the final week, then again on event day.

Technical

• Critical journeys and service dependencies are mapped and owned.
• Alert thresholds reflect campaign traffic, not weekday baselines.
• Storefront, API, DNS, TLS, payment callbacks, and order-status checks run from priority markets.
• Dashboards break down checkout and payment health by market, method, device, and version.
• Capacity limits, quotas, database pools, queues, and rate limits have documented headroom.
• Retries, circuit breakers, timeouts, and load-shedding paths have been tested.
• Gateway failover or payment-method disablement has been rehearsed.
• Payment requests use idempotency controls where the provider supports them.
• Webhook consumers handle duplicate delivery and process events asynchronously.
• Rollback steps and verification queries exist for recent releases and config changes.
• Backup restore and failover procedures have been tested against defined RTO and RPO.

People and process

• A primary and backup are named for each on-call shift.
• Incident commander and communications lead are assigned for the highest-risk window.
• Engineering, security, support, fulfilment, finance, and commercial escalation contacts are current.
• Vendor escalation contacts and account identifiers are in the runbook.
• Everyone can reach the incident system, dashboards, logs, status page, and admin consoles.
• Severity rules and authority to disable a feature, payment rail, promotion, or market are explicit.
• A short game day has tested paging, coordination, communication, and recovery checks.

Customer and commercial

• Status-page components match services customers recognise: checkout, cards, wallets, order tracking.
• Draft messages exist for checkout failure, payment delay, regional degradation, confirmation delay, and recovery.
• Support macros match the status-page language and do not promise refunds or recovery times without approval.
• A safe customer path is defined for pending or uncertain payments.
• Marketing knows who can pause campaigns and how quickly paid traffic can be reduced.