“A major tech issue” has seen Australian fashion brand The Lullaby Club refund all 7,000 orders placed in its Black Friday sale held on Wednesday.
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The Lullaby Club owner and director Marisa Taschke, who founded the e-commerce platform with her mother Kevina Taschke in 2018, confirmed in a video posted to the brand’s social media pages on Wednesday that the issue led to its 20% to 60% off sale merging with its 40% off sale, resulting in some customers getting up to 90% off their purchases.
Queensland-based The Lullaby Club also posted a statement to its Facebook page on Wednesday morning, advising its customers and community “the worst possible situation has happened on our end,” and the brand wanted to be completely transparent.
“We’ve been working hard behind the scenes on a new warehouse system, something we’ve spent a lot of time setting up to make things smoother, more accurate and more efficient for you,” the statement read.
“Unfortunately, this new system has overridden our pricing and shown a discounted price, plus an additional 40% off at checkout, which was not meant to happen.
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“Because of this, we have no choice but to refund all 7,000 orders placed this morning and set a new launch time. We will keep you fully updated as soon as we have confirmation from our back-end website team.”
The Lullaby Club confirmed it would be relaunching the sale on Friday, November 21.
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The brand, which has approximately 20 staff members, is currently featured on the shopping app Shop, which was developed by global commerce company Shopify. The digital shopping assistant helps to make it easier for customers to speed through the checkout, discover brands and track products, order and shipping details through the app.
According to a Black Friday Cyber Monday (BFCM) playbook released by Shopify, the BFCM season is a can’t-miss opportunity for businesses.
However, the platform states it takes planning to pull off a seamless operation for both customers and businesses.
Shopify recommends starting customer acquisition efforts early, choosing the right discount, timing sales to support brand goals, planning for the demand, considering sale alternatives, and keeping people engaged after the sale.
According to Shopify data, Shopify merchants made $11.5 billion in global sales over the 2024 BFCM weekend, which was up 24% from 2023.
In 2023, SmartCompany reported five Australian brands had been affected by a short-lived Shopify outage less than two weeks before the BFCM sales kickoff. However, the brands were not deterred by the outage.
In the lead-up to the BFCM sales period, like Shopify, e-commerce platforms WooCommerce and BigCommerce also released guides on how businesses could fully prepare their e-commerce stores for Black Friday.
Sydney-founded BigCommerce advised brands to audit their website and optimise functionality, streamline the checkout experience, test their site across mobile and desktop, ensure inventory is stocked and details are accurate and prepare their support team.
WooCommerce also advised businesses to optimise their websites, revealing in its Black Friday Cyber Monday Trends Survey, conducted in July 2025, the top three priorities for holiday preparations are conversion rate optimisation, marketing and promotion setup and site speed and performance.
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In the video posted to The Lullaby Club’s social media pages on Wednesday, which is currently still visible on TikTok and Instagram, owner and director Marisa Taschke further expanded on what exactly happened during Wednesday’s Black Friday sale.
“We had a major tech issue, which meant our 20% to 60% off sale merged with our 40% off sale, so people got up to 90% off,” Taschke says.
“We don’t participate in a lot of sales so Black Friday is a really big deal for us and something that we’ve been working on for a really long time.”
In the video Taschke confirmed customers will get their money back in full, and they will get an email when refunded, confirming it would take about three hours for their system to process it.
“Not a small glitch by any means, this is one of the biggest errors we’ve ever had to deal with, and it all came down to a third-party app that we were working with,” she said.
SmartCompany contacted the Australian Competition & Consumer Commission (ACCC), which advised the ACCC does not generally comment on specific businesses, as per its Media Code of Conduct.
An ACCC spokesperson confirmed the Australian Consumer Law (ACL) requires businesses to make accurate representations when selling a product or service.
“Businesses should always aim to advertise their prices correctly, but mistakes can happen. If a business becomes aware of a pricing error, it should fix the mistake immediately,” the spokesperson says.
“Businesses are entitled to withdraw a product from sale to correct inaccurate pricing or other incorrect information.”
The spokesperson added where consumers have paid for a yet unfilled order at the erroneous price, businesses should provide a remedy if withdrawing the product and order, for example, by providing a refund.
SmartCompany has approached The Lullaby Club for comment.
