Shipping Cutoffs for Christmas Delivery

Christmas falls on a Wednesday

Christmas Day is a Wednesday this year, which puts a weekend between the last full shipping week and the holiday itself. The carriers have published their holiday deadlines, as they do each autumn.

Many online shops will copy those dates onto a banner and consider the job done. It is a reasonable instinct, and it produces the wrong dates.

A carrier's deadline is the last day a parcel can enter its network and still arrive by Christmas. It says nothing about when an order placed on your website becomes a parcel in the carrier's hands.

That gap belongs to you, and in December it is wider than at any other time of year.

What the carrier's date leaves out

• Your handling time, which stretches as December's orders pile up.
• The pickup schedule, since an order placed after collection waits a day.
• The weekend, when most small shops ship nothing at all.
• Distant addresses, for which the carriers' own dates are earlier.
• Orders to the United States, which have deadlines of their own.
• Personalised or made-to-order items, which need production time first.

The first is the one that moves. A shop that ships the same day in July may need two or three days in mid-December, and a cutoff built on July's pace is wrong by exactly that much.

Working out your own dates

Take each shipping method you offer and find the carrier's published date for the farthest region you ship to with it.

Count back your handling time at December volumes, not the usual figure. If the carrier collects at two in the afternoon, an order placed after noon on the last day is already too late.

Skip Saturday and Sunday unless you genuinely ship on them, and give remote addresses their own, earlier line rather than one date that is wrong for them.

The result is a short table: each method, each region, one date. It will be earlier than you hoped, which is the reason for working it out.

A date for the product, where it differs

A shop-wide date assumes every item is on the shelf and ready to pack. Many are not.

Anything engraved, monogrammed, made to order, or shipped directly from a supplier needs its own cutoff, earlier by however long that step takes in December.

That date belongs on the product page itself, beside the add to cart button, because the customer has no other way of knowing this item is different.

On the product page and in the cart

The product page is where the decision to buy from you is made, so it needs one line near the price: the last order date for Christmas delivery, with a link to the full table.

The cart is the last point where a customer can still change course. A note there, with the date for each method, catches the person about to choose the cheapest option out of habit.

A worked example

A two-person workshop makes personalised wooden signs, with family names, house numbers and cabin names carved into cedar, and sells them online alongside a few ready-made designs.

Last year its banner gave the carriers' Christmas dates. A customer ordered a family name sign with express shipping several days before the express deadline, and reasonably expected it for Christmas.

Names were carved, painted and sealed in batches, and in December the queue ran to about a week. The sign left the workshop after the express deadline had passed and arrived between Christmas and New Year's.

The banner showed the carrier's date, the product page still said ships in two to three business days, and nothing anywhere mentioned the carving queue.

This year the shop has two sets of dates, ready-made and personalised, and the earlier one appears on every product page that takes a name.

After that date the personalisation option is switched off, and the ready-made signs carry on.

The order placed after the cutoff

Orders will keep arriving after the last date. Decide now what they get, not at eleven at night on the twentieth.

Keep selling, with a clear line on the product page, at the cart and in the confirmation email that the order will arrive after Christmas.

Or offer only the faster methods, at their real price. Or switch to local pickup and emailed gift cards for the final days.

What does not work is silence. A customer who orders on the twenty-first without being told will assume, and the assumption will be Christmas.

What to say, written now

Two emails arrive every December, and both are easier to answer with a reply drafted in November.

The first asks whether an order placed today will arrive in time. The honest answer names the method that still might, says plainly which will not, and offers the alternatives.

The second comes from someone who ordered before the cutoff and is still waiting. The reply gives the tracking link and says what you know, without guessing.

It also says what you will do if the parcel misses Christmas, whether that is refunding the shipping or emailing a gift card to put under the tree.

Order by, not guaranteed by

A carrier's holiday date is its best estimate under ordinary conditions, and December is rarely ordinary. Weather and volume move it.

Write order by, not guaranteed by, unless you are prepared to refund or replace every parcel that misses. A promise on a product page is still a promise when the truck is late.

The counter-case

Some shops can keep this simpler. A business delivering mostly within one city, with its own van or a pickup counter, needs one date and a line about collection.

A shop selling things people rarely give as presents, such as replacement parts or office supplies, needs a note at checkout and little else.

And a very small shop that would rather stop shipping on a fixed day and sell gift cards afterwards can say exactly that.

For everyone else, the carrier's date is the starting point. Your own date, by method and by product, is what customers need to see.

This week

1. Collect the carriers' holiday dates for every method.
2. Measure your December handling time honestly.
3. Subtract it and the pickup time from each date.
4. Set earlier dates for personalised and made-to-order items.
5. Show the dates on product and cart pages.
6. Decide what late orders get after each cutoff.
7. Draft the two replies you will need.

Step two is the one most shops skip. Everything else is arithmetic on the carriers' dates, and the arithmetic is only as good as an honest answer to how long a December order waits before it leaves.

Why the cutoffs arrive so soon after Black Friday this year is covered in a shorter holiday season this year.

Frequently asked questions

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