10 Christmas marketing ideas, before and after the last shipping day

What are the Christmas 2026 shipping dates for your store?

Your last order day is the carrier's send-by date minus the days you take to pack. Say you pack in two business days and ship Ground Advantage: your last order day is Tuesday, December 15.

The domestic dates are for the Lower 48 states. Alaska, Hawaii and the US territories keep the same First-Class and Priority Mail dates, but Ground Advantage there can take 10 days or more. These are USPS's recommendations, not guarantees, so promise a last order day and never a delivery date. UPS and FedEx post their own dates on their sites.

Which Christmas marketing ideas run before your last order day?

Until your last order day, sell the gift and say when it has to be ordered.

1. Put your last order day on every page

Write it in your announcement bar, the strip across the top of your store that you edit in the theme editor: "Order by December 15 for Christmas delivery." The bar has no end date of its own, so take it down by hand once the day passes. Or schedule the change in Rollouts, under Markets, as an "Event", which publishes it for a set period and then undoes it. Rollouts need the Basic plan or higher, as our Shopify Editions guide covers.

A true deadline is the honest kind of scarcity marketing. It also protects you: a gift that lands after Christmas can come back as a chargeback.

Sledge's Global Countdown puts the same date on a timer across your store. Under Timer type, pick "Countdown to date" in place of the default, "Fixed minutes", and it counts down to a day and hour you choose. Set its "Active dates", the days it shows, from December 1 to your last order day. The countdown disappears from your store when it reaches zero. The end hour is read on each shopper's device clock, so a shopper whose clock runs ahead of yours sees it end sooner.

2. Turn a collection into a gift guide by price

Create a collection called Gifts under $50. In its Products source, the part that fills it with products by rules, add two conditions: "Price is less than" 50, and "Inventory stock is greater than 0", so sold-out products drop out on their own. Set it to match all conditions, then repeat for $25 and $100. To let shoppers narrow the guide by who the gift is for, follow our gift guide filters post. The rest of the collection settings are in Shopify collections.

3. Sell gift sets that are ready to give

A ready-made set is one gift the shopper doesn't have to put together. Shopify Bundles, Shopify's free app, builds fixed bundles and multipacks from your admin. Sledge's fixed bundles show the set at its bundle price on the product page and in collection, search and instant search results. Either way, a stockout of one item sells out the whole set, so check stock on the parts before December. Which sets to build is in 8 Shopify bundle ideas, and Sledge's offer types are on its bundles page.

4. Give a free gift above a spend

Make an automatic Buy X get Y discount. Under Customer buys, pick "Minimum purchase amount", the spend that earns the gift. The heading then changes to Customer spends. Under Customer gets, pick one product and set it to Free. Shopify's Help Center names the catch: the free item is never added to the cart for the shopper. Say so on the product page and in the cart, or the shopper may never know to add it.

Sledge's Free Gift adds the gift to the cart by itself once the cart reaches your goal, a minimum spend or a minimum number of items. Each offer has one gift product, and the offer shows on the product page, the cart page and the cart drawer.

Say your average order is $60. A $75 goal sits one small item above it. If you want a code on top of the gift, 10% off and a free gift shows how, and the free gift setup guide runs the margin math.

5. Run twelve days of deals, one a day

Make twelve discounts, say for December 4 to 15, so the last one ends on your last order day. Give each the same start and end day under "Schedule", the section with the discount's dates, and it runs for that one day in your store's time zone. If a deal crosses out a "was" price, make it one you charged for a real stretch of time. That is the test in the FTC's guide on former prices. Each discount follows the steps in how to create a discount code. If the deals run beside the free gift, read two promotions at the same time first.

6. Email your list three times

Send a gift guide on December 1, a reminder two days before your last order day, and a gift card email the day after it. Shopify Messaging, Shopify's email tool, runs on the Basic plan and up and sends 10,000 emails free each month, then $1 per 1,000 more. Three sends to a list of 3,000 use 9,000 of them, and your automated emails share the 1,000 left. Abandoned checkout emails stay free. Shopify email marketing covers the rest of the tool, and texts have their own post, SMS marketing on Shopify.

What still sells after the last shipping day?

After the last shipping day, sell what no carrier has to deliver: gift cards, pickup and local delivery. Once your last order day passes, point the announcement bar at gift cards and pickup.

7. Sell gift cards with a send date

A gift card bought on December 24 can still arrive on the 25th. Dawn, from version 9.0.0, and the Horizon themes can show a recipient form on a gift card's product page. The buyer enters the recipient's email and can add a name, a message and a "Send on" date. Scheduled cards go out between about 4 and 10 a.m. in the buyer's time zone. Selling the card itself is in Shopify gift cards.

8. Offer local pickup or local delivery

This one needs a shop, studio or stockroom near your shoppers. Pickup in store is set up per location and needs the latest version of Shopify's checkout. One order can mix shipped items with picked-up ones. Local delivery covers up to 100 miles from a location, or a list of postal codes, in up to 10 zones. It works with Shop Pay but not with Apple Pay, Google Pay, Amazon Pay or PayPal, and shipped items can't share an order with locally delivered ones.

What should run after Christmas?

After Christmas, the work turns to returns and one last sale.

9. Give December orders a longer return window

In your return rules, pick a longer "Return window", the days a shopper has to ask for a return, or type your own under Custom days. Shopify applies a change only to orders placed after you save it, so make it before the first Christmas order and set it back in January.

A window override can give one collection, such as your gift guide, a longer window of its own. Where a product sits in two overrides, the shorter window wins. Say a gift is delivered December 5 on a 30-day window counted from delivery: the shopper can ask to return it until January 4, ten days after Christmas. The rest of the flow is in ecommerce returns.

10. Start an after-Christmas sale on December 26

Run one discount from Saturday, December 26 to Friday, January 1, and schedule an email for the morning of the 26th. Check first that the countdown and the Christmas announcement are gone. While the gifts are new, ask December's buyers for a photo of the gift in use. Our post on user-generated content examples shows how.