Use this guide to ensure your user-generated content (UGC) program is ready, and your systems run smoothly during the peak holiday season.

Freeze dates

• Black Friday:  November 27, 2026
• Cyber Monday:  November 30, 2026 
• Christmas Day:  December 25, 2026

Code freeze periods for 2026

Important: During the Code Freeze period (Mon, Nov 09, 2026 – Mon, Jan 04, 2027), all software updates and production deployments will undergo strict review and formal approval prior to release. 

Code freeze windows

Application criticality list

Bazaarvoice applications are grouped into High, Medium, and Low tiers. The criticality tiers dictate change restrictions during soft code and deep freeze windows.

Code freeze scope

Code freeze period:  Mon, November 9, 2026 12:01 AM CST through Mon, January 4, 2027 11:59 PM CST  

During the code freeze, Bazaarvoice will:

• Maintain a cache period between 55 and 110 minutes for our edge network to optimize the hosted display and the Ratings & Reviews (Conversations) API.
• Not make changes to any applications classified as high or medium criticality, except to fix critical issues or make minor changes that do not impact your consumer site or mobile app experiences.
• Enforce strict review and approval workflows for all proposed updates based on application criticality tiers [High/Medium/Low].

Note: Examples of minor, non-impacting changes include updates to configuration settings, Portal, and other applications that don't affect your consumer site or mobile app experience. 

Our normal release cadence will resume Tue, January 5, 2027 at 12:01 AM CST.  

Deep freeze

During the deep freeze, Bazaarvoice will further lock down our systems and make only critical system changes. Critical system changes are infrastructure or configuration changes required to restore service or prevent service disruption.

• Deep freeze 1: Nov 20, 2026 12:01 AM CST through Dec 01, 2026 11:59 PM CST     
• Deep freeze 2:  Dec 18, 2026 12:01 AM CST through Jan 04, 2027 11:59 PM CST      

The following image shows the correlation between API calls, product page views, and order count from July 2025 to January 2026 and how they spiked during the BFCM 2025 holiday shopping season.

Holiday preparedness tasks

To prepare for the holiday season, review the following tasks and identify items that are relevant to you:

General

• Sign up for system status notifications
• Update emergency contact information
• Ensure your product catalog is up to date
• Schedule load testing, if needed
• Send us scaling forecast data

Hosted display for Ratings & Reviews and Questions & Answers

• Verify your display integration code
• Optimize display
• Verify your review requests (formerly post-interaction email or PIE)
• Optimize review submission
• Verify schema.org markup for SEO
• Verify BV Pixel, if implemented
• Verify syndication
• Enable Ask a Product Owner, if wanted

Ratings & Reviews (Conversations) API

• Verify your data caching strategy
• Optimize display
• Optimize review submission
• Review our security imperatives
• Check your API usage (see details directly below) 

Note: Default API limits: this is active for the holiday season only (November and December). Read our Conversations API Terms of Use for complete details.  

Important: If your expected traffic exceeds the doubled rate limit, submit a temporary limit increase request to Bazaarvoice Support in advance. If you do not contact Bazaarvoice and exceed your API call rate limit, your calls may be throttled to the defined limit.

Sampling

Finalize your Sampling campaign plans by the end of September to have content live by Black Friday. For more information, contact your Bazaarvoice representative or Bazaarvoice Support. 

Social (aka Vibe)

• Verify your account connections
• Verify your Google Analytics or Adobe Analytics connection
• Verify Instagram Like2Buy and TikTok Like2Buy
• Verify your Galleries, Reveal, and Showroom displays
• Verify your product catalog connection

We encourage you to use your social and display features during the holiday season. However, we recommend that you do not make changes to your product catalog, analytics connections, or on-site code during the code freeze period listed above.

Caution:  Issues introduced or exposed by changes to these features may not be fixed until after the code freeze has been lifted. Bazaarvoice addresses critical issues immediately, but minor issues may not be addressed until after the end of the code freeze. 

affable.ai

• Create your holiday campaigns before your launch date and add creators to them early
• Optimize your Creator Portal by configuring product details, tasks, and affiliate settings

Product catalog updates

If you plan to update your product catalog, do so as soon as possible. Updates might include:

• Changes to the product hierarchy to align with preferred reporting at brand, category, or product levels
• Addition of new products or deletion of old ones
• Updates to the product information required for syndication including brand name, UPC, EAN, ISBN, product page URL, product image URL, or manufacturer part number

Updates through Portal

Use Portal to quickly view and manage your product catalog. Common tasks include correcting errors that originate in your feed and adding missing product data.

Note: Updates to catalog data using Portal take priority over data that comes from feeds and Dynamic Catalog Collection (DCC). Learn more about catalog data source priority.

Product feeds

If you provide product catalog data in a single feed file, send the updated feed to Bazaarvoice by October 31. We strongly recommend this for retail clients with large product catalogs.

We also recommend that you send updated feeds before the products are live on your website. This will allow us to set up syndication connections and ensure that all systems are properly indexed.

Large-scale product catalog changes

During the code freeze and deep freeze, Bazaarvoice will closely monitor all incoming product catalog feeds. If we detect large-scale changes in an incoming product catalog feed, we may pause its import if it could negatively impact overall system performance. We do this to ensure no degradation in the performance of the hosted display, API, and feed export systems. We will resume importing the feed when we determine it is appropriate to do so.

Maximize conversion rates

Brands syndicating to retailers

If you are a brand that syndicates content to retailers, ensure your retail channel partners have correct and complete product information.

Pre-holiday load and advance performance testing

Bazaarvoice proactively scales our systems to handle increased holiday traffic and leverages a content delivery network (CDN) to ensure optimal performance during periods of high demand. Because we serve many of the world's largest retailers and brands, we add significant load capacity for the entire holiday season. Our capacity scaling strategy considers factors like network growth, online shopping popularity, and mobile shopping, based on historical data from the Bazaarvoice Network.

You must schedule load and performance tests at least three weeks in advance because of the stress that the holiday season puts on our systems. All requests will be assigned an available testing slot. Requests will be assigned a testing slot based on the order in which we receive them. Testing slots fill up quickly, so we can't guarantee that you will receive a testing slot.

We do this because tests conducted outside of an approved testing slot may be negatively impacted when other tests are occurring at the same time, making the results invalid. Testing slots are limited. Contact Bazaarvoice Support as soon as possible to schedule load or performance testing of your systems that incorporate Bazaarvoice products. Depending on the scope of your agreement, service fees may apply. Contact your Client Success Director with any questions.

Note: Bazaarvoice reserves the right to charge service fees for unscheduled load tests.

Security

The number of security attacks against online retailers peaks during the holiday season. Our priority is protecting you and your customers' data while supporting safe and secure shopping. To prevent malicious activity, Bazaarvoice continuously monitors and blocks application layer attacks.

We will alert you to known security threats affecting Bazaarvoice systems through the system status notification system. Contact Bazaarvoice Support to report a security incident.

System status notifications

If you've subscribed to Bazaarvoice system status notifications, we will send email and SMS alerts about incidents and security threats.

To receive email and SMS alerts about issues affecting Bazaarvoice systems, go to status.bazaarvoice.com and select Subscribe to updates.

Technical emergency contacts

Accurate contact information is crucial so we can reach you during the holiday season if we detect an issue. Contact Bazaarvoice Support to verify and update your technical emergency contacts. Your emergency contacts should include at least one person on call during the peak holiday season.

Note: To avoid single points of failure, we strongly recommend you include a distribution group email address in addition to email addresses and phone numbers for individual emergency contacts. Phone numbers are our preferred method of communication in case of emergency.

Contacting Bazaarvoice

With offices across the globe, the Bazaarvoice Support team has holiday schedules in place to ensure you have 24/7 coverage for critical issues. Bazaarvoice defines a critical issue as an outage impacting the following services:

• Submission or display in production
• Publication to social networks
• CAS, Social Commerce, or affable.ai dashboards
• Influenster app

Reaching out to Bazaarvoice Support directly is especially important during the holiday season because it's the quickest way to resolve any issues you encounter.

Important: If you have a critical issue, use one of the following three methods to contact us:

1. Live chat

Available from the Support Community at the following times:

• 8:30 AM to 5:00 PM CST UTC-5 on regular US business days
• 8:30 AM to 5:00 PM GMT on regular UK business days
• 9:00 AM to 5:00 PM AEST on regular APAC business days
  
  

2. Telephone

Available 24/7 for critical issues. If your call is not answered, you must leave a voicemail with your name and phone number (including country code) to ensure a return call. All other requests will be managed during regional business hours.

3. Online

1. Sign in to the Bazaarvoice Portal.
2. On the Portal homepage, select Access the Support Community.
3. Select Open a Case.
4. Select your client instance (BV site).
5. From the drop-down menu, select Production Outage/Legal/Privacy Breach.
6. File a case describing the details of the problem, steps to reproduce, and example links.
7. Select Confirm.
8. If available, attach a screenshot as a case comment.

You will receive an automated response to confirm receipt of your request. A service representative will respond to your case in accordance with the Service Level Objective (SLO). For more information on how to create a support case, read our support article.

Application criticality & freeze policy

Bazaarvoice classifies applications by criticality (High, Medium, Low) to determine what changes are permitted during each freeze period.

Application criticality levels

 Freeze policy by criticality

All exception releases require strict review and internal approval from Bazaarvoice.

Common Code Freeze FAQs

To help you prepare for a seamless holiday shopping season, we have assembled answers to the most common questions asked during this period.

Platform Performance & Monitoring

   Incident Management & Reliability

Architecture & Infrastructure Dependencies

Code Freeze & Operational Policies

Regional Compliance & French Code FAQs