None of These

Every November, ecommerce companies solemnly announce their code freeze periods. No deployments until January. Protect the revenue. Guard the infrastructure. And then, inevitably, code gets deployed anyway because the market doesn't care about your internal policies.

There was a time when a click meant something. It was intent made visible, a measurable signal that someone had chosen to move closer to you. Marketers built careers on optimizing that moment. Analysts built dashboards around it. The entire apparatus of ecommerce measurement treated the click as the fundamental unit of customer behavior. The click is dying. And most ecommerce data teams haven't noticed yet. The Shift Nobody Measured Commerce is being absorbed into the surface

BFCM is a Nash equilibrium. It's stable. It's collectively irrational. And we're all trapped in it. The mathematics are clear. The incentives are clear. The outcome is predictable. And yet every November, we wake up, look at our margins, and do it again.* *Written by someone who reads too much game theory and has to explain to the C-Suite every year why BFCM margins are terrible despite everyone knowing in advance that BFCM margins will be terrible.