Before your code freeze

Before your peak season development freeze, work with your team on prioritizing implementation for any high-priority optimization projects from your backlog. Ask your team and key stakeholders what would be most impactful to the season and reaching your goals.



However, when you’re deciding on what you want to accomplish before the freeze starts, make sure your team has the capacity to execute these projects with attention for detail and precision. Don’t make this high impact improvement opportunity into a high impact problem that could compromise revenue and user experience.

Consumer holiday shopping doesn’t mean cybersecurity should take a holiday. In fact, the holiday shopping season can cause a spike in fraud and cybercrime. To keep your company and your customers secure, consider vulnerability testing and communicate with your customers how you’re keeping their data safe this holiday season.



This is also a good opportunity to look at what fraud solutions your payment gateway provider recommends. For our global customers, we are recommending they review their network tokenization and card on file strategy. We are also upgrading our customers to the latest EMV 3DS 2.2 in September.

The holiday shopping season is the time to dazzle customers with deals, specials and free shipping. Customers want to go from wish list to order placed quickly which means this is not the time to add more form fields or steps to your checkout process. Instead look at how you’re storing your customer details and see if there are ways to improve the checkout speed and convenience using either Click to Pay guest checkout for new customers, or if you want to take the burden off your development team and make changes quickly, consider utilizing our hosted checkout with Click to Pay already integrated.



Whatever payment options you choose, keep in mind the last thing you want is to question why your customers are not receiving their items on time or, worse, why they are not finishing their orders.

Be realistic as you get closer to the freeze date. In some instances, you may need to shift out which projects you can accomplish before your deadline and which you need roll out past your code freeze deadline — and that’s okay. It’s better to go live with fully vetted and tested code after the holiday shopping peak season than make an error and feel a negative impact during the holiday season.

Now is a time your team can spend uncovering and diagnosing any lingering bugs or issues you’ve been encountering during the calendar year. With a lot off their plate, it’s a perfect time to investigate and solve issues with your software.

With most of the year behind you, look at what your team has accomplished and determine what should be on your goals and priorities for the following year. Have payment trends shifted? Do you need to accommodate for new market expansion?



Use this time to take a step back and see how your team’s strengths can contribute to next year’s business goals.

You and your team have accomplished a lot during the calendar year. Make sure your developer documentation reflects all this hard work and is properly updated before a busy season starts again in January. We’ve also recently completed this exercise and have updated our Merchant Cloud developer integration guides with a refreshed API reference section and more content to help you integrate your gateway instance.

The festive holiday season should still be about appreciating time spent with family, friends and taking a break from work. Whatever that time looks like for you and your team, make sure to show each other appreciation for all their efforts this year.