An order spike is handled before it arrives, not during. A promotion that lands packs a normal week’s worth of messages into two hours: 300 WhatsApp messages are enough to drown a two-person team, sell the same item twice and let unverified payments through. The method comes down to three preparation milestones and one triage rule for the day itself.
What actually breaks during an order spike
During an order spike, demand is almost never the missing piece: the capacity to answer is. A promotion that lands compresses a week of normal traffic into a few hours. Three hundred WhatsApp messages in two hours are enough to saturate a small team, and first-response time slides from a few minutes to three hours.
That delay costs sales outright. A customer who waits three hours has already messaged another seller, or simply moved on. The cancellations do not show up in the day’s revenue figure: they show up in the gap between messages received and orders actually paid for.
The second casualty of an order spike is stock sold twice. When several people answer in parallel with no shared record, the same item goes to two customers, and one of them gets a refund or a disappointment. The promotion meant to carry your month gets paid for in reputation, on the very channels you sell through.
D-7: only promote what you can actually deliver
One week out, you freeze the scope of the promotion. Only items whose real quantity you have counted in the shop go in, not the quantity showing in a spreadsheet nobody has corrected. References that already move fast in a normal week stay out: putting them in a promotion is scheduling a stockout at the worst possible moment.
The catalogue then has to say the same thing everywhere. A promotional price fixed on Instagram but forgotten on WhatsApp buys you hours of argument mid-spike, and customers who insist on the lower of the two. The D-7 checklist fits in four points:
- Count what is genuinely in stock, reference by reference
- Freeze items too tight to absorb promotional volume
- Update photos and prices on TikTok, Instagram and WhatsApp
- Brief the delivery team on the dates and areas involved
Briefing the couriers belongs to the same problem as stock. A paid order that sits for three days produces exactly the same complaint as a stockout, on exactly the same channel. Agree with them up front on the days covered, the areas served, and how many runs a day is realistic.
D-3 and D-1: canned answers, then a full funnel test
Three days out, you write the answers to the questions the promotion will trigger. They are always the same ones: how long the offer runs, whether you deliver to Bouaké, whether Wave is accepted, whether size 42 is left. Around twenty short, definitive answers cover most of the incoming volume, and they work better inside your AI agent than in a notes app.
The day before, you place a real test order, from a customer’s phone rather than your admin account. A step that snags with no traffic on it blows up under load. Walk the path in the exact order your customer will live it, without skipping the one you think you know by heart:
- Tap the ad from the TikTok or Instagram feed
- Open the WhatsApp conversation it launches
- Ask for the product, get price, stock and delivery time
- Pay by Mobile Money all the way through the transaction
- Check the confirmation lands on both the customer and shop side
Time each step as you go. A funnel that takes four minutes with nobody on it takes longer with thirty conversations running at once, and that delay is what sets the abandonment rate during the spike. The same friction costs sales outside promotions too, as the six levers for growing online sales sets out.
On the day: route conversations instead of handling them all
On promotion day, mistake number one is handling every message by hand. Triage is decided the evening before, not in the middle of the order spike: every incoming conversation belongs to one of three streams, and nobody wonders whose it is. The target fits on one line — 80% of conversations resolved without you, split as follows.
- AI agent: price, availability, delivery areas, payment methods
- First human: negotiations, large baskets, loyal customers
- Second human: after-sales, complaints, payment problems
The split works because the volume in a spike is overwhelmingly repetitive. An agent wired into your catalogue answers price and stock questions continuously, while your people keep the exchanges where their judgement counts. Automating WhatsApp, Instagram and TikTok messages sets out what an agent handles alone and what it should hand over.
A tool like Bedones Moderator routes each conversation to the right treatment, following rules you define up front. Those rules get set the evening before, with a clear head, and not during the order spike, when three screens are flashing and the reflex is to answer whoever shouts loudest.
Securing payments, then debriefing the next day
An order spike also attracts payment fraud: forged Orange Money receipts, doctored Wave screenshots, amounts edited into the image. Volume works against you, because a screenshot glanced at for three seconds in the middle of three hundred messages sails right through. The rule takes no exceptions during a promotion: nothing ships without API confirmation of the payment.
The check runs on three cross-referenced data points — phone number, amount and transaction reference — and the slightest doubt triggers a second verification before dispatch. Wiring the operators up properly removes the problem at the source, since confirmation then becomes automatic: the Orange Money, MTN MoMo and Wave comparison covers what each one requires on the merchant side.
The next day, take thirty minutes and write down four things: how many messages came in and how many were handled, how many baskets were saved and how many lost, which question came up most, and the moment the team went under. Those four readings steer the next promotion, and the one after that. Without them, every order spike is prepared from scratch.