How to offer Black Friday BOPIS for your WooCommerce store

On the Saturday after Thanksgiving, a garden centre with one pickup counter and two staff takes 140 pickup orders for the same morning. Most of those customers chose 10:00, because 10:00 was the first slot the checkout offered and nothing stopped the next person choosing it too. By quarter past ten there is a queue out of the door and half the orders have not been bagged.

Buy online, pick up in store (BOPIS) should be the easy option over Black Friday weekend. There is no carrier cut-off and no shipping cost, and the customer has the item the same day. That only holds if your checkout limits how many people can arrive at once, knows which days you are closed and gives the counter a list of what to prepare. Those are settings, and they need to be in place before the traffic arrives, not on the Friday morning.

This guide covers those settings in Advanced Local Pickup Pro (ALP PRO), our WooCommerce local pickup plugin, in the order we would set them for a store expecting a busy weekend. In 2026, Black Friday is 27 November and Cyber Monday is 30 November, so you have about four weeks to configure and test.

Why store pickup breaks on Black Friday

Pickup rarely fails because of the software. It fails because the defaults suit an ordinary Tuesday. Four of them matter at peak:

• Time slots have no capacity limit by default. Appointments per time slot is set to Unlimited out of the box, so every customer can book the same ten o’clock slot.
• Holiday dates do not close the calendar. The Common Public Holidays field is shown to customers next to your business hours, but it does not stop anyone booking that day.
• Preparation time starts at zero. If you have not set one, an order placed at 9:58 can book a 10:00 collection.
• Reminders depend on WP-Cron. Pickup reminders are sent by WordPress’s scheduled tasks, which only run when the site gets traffic or a server cron triggers them.

Each of these is one setting. The steps below change them in turn.

How to set up Black Friday BOPIS in WooCommerce

Most of these options are set per location, under WooCommerce > Local Pickup Pro > Pickup Locations > Edit location. If you run more than one store, repeat steps 2 to 4 for each one.

1. Confirm pickup appears on your checkout

WooCommerce has two pickup methods: the classic zone-based Local Pickup method and the checkout block’s own Local pickup method. Which one applies depends on your checkout page, and ALP PRO supports both. Check this now, because a theme or checkout change since last year can quietly swap one for the other. The Getting Started guide shows how to tell which one you have. If you are still adding stores, our guide to setting up multiple pickup locations in WooCommerce covers that part.

2. Turn on appointments and cap each time slot

Tick Enable Pickup Appointment in the location’s information section. The Pickup Appointments section then appears. Set three fields:

• Time slot intervals: how often a slot starts. Fifteen minutes is a sensible peak setting.
• Appointments per time slot: how many customers can book the same slot. Work it out from your counter, not your hopes. If two staff each take about three minutes per handover, a 15-minute slot clears roughly ten customers, so set it to eight and keep the margin.
• Customers schedule pickup time: X days to Y days into the future: the booking window. A range of 0 to 10 lets a Black Friday buyer collect any day up to 7 December, which spreads collections across the following week.

When a slot reaches its limit, customers stop seeing it at checkout and pick the next one.

3. Set a preparation time and a same-day cutoff

In the same section, Set preparation time to how long your team actually needs to pick and bag an order on a busy day, which is usually longer than normal. With a two-hour preparation time, an order placed at 10:00 cannot book a slot before 12:00. If you allow same-day pickup, set Latest order hour for same day pickup as well, so orders placed late in the afternoon roll to the next open day. These are location settings, not Black Friday settings, so put a reminder in the calendar to restore them afterwards.

4. Set your Black Friday hours with exception dates

This is the step most stores get wrong. To close a day or change its hours, use Exception hours for specific dates in the Pickup Time Slots calendar, not the holiday list. Edit multiple dates at once lets you set 27 to 30 November in one pass, and Split daily pickup work hours lets you keep a gap in the middle of the day for restocking.

To close for Thanksgiving on 26 November, remove that date’s hours with an exception. Then add a line to the Holidays/Exception Message field under Business Hours so customers can see why. The message is display-only, so the exception is what closes the date.

Do this now rather than in late November. If you close a date that already has bookings, the plugin keeps those appointments as recorded and does not move or cancel them.

5. Automate the pickup status workflow

Under WooCommerce > Local Pickup Pro > Settings > Local Pickup Workflow, enable the three pickup statuses (Processing LP, Ready For Pickup and Picked Up) and their emails. Then, in Settings > Cart & Checkout Options, turn on Automatically change the order status from processing to processing LP for local pickup orders so new orders enter the workflow without anyone touching them.

One point causes most “the customer never got told” tickets. The Ready for Pickup email is sent when the order status changes to Ready For Pickup, not when payment clears. If your team marks orders Completed out of habit, enable the location option Automatically mark as Ready For Pickup when the order status is Completed so the email still goes out.

6. Schedule pickup reminders

In the location’s Notifications section, set Trigger the pickup reminder notification X before the appointment time for appointment-based locations. For walk-in locations, use Send pickup reminder after X days with an optional second reminder. Uncollected orders take up shelf space you need over the weekend, so the second reminder is worth turning on. Ask your host to set up a server cron if you have not already, because reminders that rely on site traffic can arrive late in quiet hours. To send reminders by text as well as email, ALP PRO works with WooCommerce SMS notifications.

7. Let customers reschedule, within limits

Under Settings > Display Options, tick Allow customers to change pickup details after placing the order, then Limit appointment changes before pickup, and set a window such as 12 hours. Customers who cannot make Saturday can then move their own booking instead of emailing you, and nobody can move a slot an hour before it starts.

8. Speed up the handover with curbside and QR codes

Two features take time out of each collection. Curbside pickup (per location, under Curbside Pickup) asks for vehicle details at checkout. Once the order is Ready for Pickup, the customer can tap I’ve arrived on their order page, which emails the location’s notification recipients. The pickup confirmation QR code (Settings > Display Options) lets staff scan a code at the counter to mark an order Picked Up. Set a Staff Pickup PIN so a shared tablet can confirm pickups without a logged-in account. Our guide to QR code scan-to-confirm pickup in WooCommerce walks through the scanning flow.

9. Decide whether pickup gets its own discount

This step is optional. Each location has a Cart Adjustment Rule under Price Adjustments, which can be a percentage or fixed discount, or a fee. A small pickup discount moves orders away from carriers in the weeks when they are slowest, and that helps if your shipping cutoff dates are already tight. The adjustment applies only to the items assigned to that location.

Run pickup days from the Today board

On the weekend itself, open WooCommerce > Fulfillment and select the Today tab on a tablet at the counter. It lists every pickup order due today, grouped by time slot, with counts for Total, Preparing, Ready and Picked Up across the top. Each card has Mark as Ready for Pickup and Mark as Picked Up buttons, and a location filter shows one store at a time. The board refreshes every 30 seconds, and “today” follows your site’s timezone, not the tablet’s clock.

How to check it works before Black Friday

1. Capacity: set Appointments per time slot to 1 on a test location and place two orders for the same slot. The second checkout should not offer it. Then restore your real number.
2. Exception dates: open the checkout date picker and step through 26 to 30 November. Closed dates should not be selectable, and the changed hours should show the right slots.
3. Workflow: place a pickup order and confirm it moves to Processing LP. The status change is recorded in the order notes, and the Processing LP email should arrive.
4. Handover: mark the order Ready For Pickup, then check the email, the QR code on the order page and, for curbside locations, the I’ve arrived button.
5. Reminders: book a slot a few hours ahead with a short reminder lead time. If the reminder arrives late, fix your cron before the weekend.
6. Timezone: confirm Settings > General > Timezone matches the store. Slots are calculated in site time, and a wrong timezone shifts or hides them.

What this setup does not do

• The holiday list does not block bookings. Only exception hours, removed time slots or a disabled location do.
• Changing hours does not move existing appointments. If you close a period that already has bookings, you need to contact those customers yourself.
• Slot capacity counts bookings, not items. A forty-item order and a one-item order each take one place, so leave slack if your Black Friday baskets run large.
• Customers book in your store’s local time, not their own. This matters if you sell across a timezone line.
• Reminders are only as punctual as WP-Cron. On a low-traffic or heavily cached site, they need a real server cron.

Frequently asked questions

What is BOPIS in WooCommerce?

BOPIS stands for buy online, pick up in store, which UK shoppers usually call click and collect. In WooCommerce, the customer chooses a pickup shipping method at checkout instead of delivery, pays online and collects from your shop or warehouse. A pickup plugin adds the parts a busy store needs: a choice of locations, booked time slots, status emails and a handover process at the counter.

Can WooCommerce do BOPIS without a plugin?

Partly. WooCommerce’s built-in Local Pickup method lets a customer choose pickup at checkout. It does not limit how many customers can book the same time, send a ready-for-pickup email on its own status or give staff a daily pick-list. For a normal week that may be enough. For Black Friday volume, the missing capacity limit is the problem.

Can I close pickup on Thanksgiving but open longer on Black Friday?

Yes. In the location’s Pickup Time Slots calendar, add an exception for 26 November with no hours, and exceptions for 27 to 30 November with your extended hours. Use the Holidays/Exception Message field to explain the change to customers. Adding 26 November to the holiday list on its own will not stop bookings, because that list is informational.

What happens to existing bookings if I change my hours?

They stay as booked. Changing hours, slot intervals or capacity only affects which slots new customers see. Appointments already on orders keep their original date and time, and the plugin does not cancel or move them. If you close a day that has bookings, filter the Fulfillment dashboard by that appointment date and contact those customers directly.

Can seasonal staff confirm pickups without a WordPress login?

Yes, if you set a Staff Pickup PIN under Display Options. Staff scan the customer’s QR code on a shared phone or tablet and enter the PIN to mark the order Picked Up. After five wrong attempts, the device is locked out for fifteen minutes. Leave the PIN blank if you would rather require a logged-in shop manager.

Can a customer collect some items and have others shipped?

Yes. ALP PRO supports mixed pickup and shipping orders, and per-item pickup lets each product in the cart have its own location and appointment. That helps over Black Friday when a customer buys a bulky item for collection alongside small items they want delivered. You can also force pickup for specific products or categories that should never be shipped.

Get pickup ready before the rush

A Black Friday pickup counter works when the checkout does the queue management for you. That means a capacity on every slot, exception hours for the holiday weekend, a preparation time your team can meet, and a Today board at the counter. Set these up this week, run the six checks above, and you still have time to fix anything before the 27th. To compare pickup plugins before you choose, see our WooCommerce local pickup plugin comparison.