After a few seasonal launches this year, the 4 things that break FIRST when a store drops a spring collection
every spring/seasonal drop i help with, the same handful of things break — and it's never the part people worry about. sharing my pre-launch checklist in case it saves someone a rough launch day:
collection sort silently resets. bulk-add 40 new products and your "manual" order gets buried — hero products end up on page 2. set sort to manual and drag your 6-8 best sellers to the top AFTER the import, not before.
image weight kills mobile LCP. those gorgeous spring lifestyle shots are 4MB each. anything over ~200kb above the fold roughly doubles mobile load time, right when launch traffic spikes. compress before upload, don't trust the theme to do it.
carryover "out of stock" states stick. winter products still show sold-out badges or hidden variants. check inventory policy on every variant, not just the product — it doesn't always inherit.
discount code + bundle app fight on the cart. if you run a launch code AND a bundle app, test the actual cart math before going live. they race each other and the wrong one usually wins silently.
curious what breaks for everyone else on a seasonal launch — is it always inventory, or does speed/theme bite you harder? what's your worst launch-day surprise?