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Start in October: set up accounts with at least two carriers, publish your order cutoff dates early, stock boxes and labels, and build peak surcharges into your prices. The stores that survive Black Friday shipping are the ones that did the boring setup work before the orders arrived. Nothing on this list is hard, which is exactly why most small businesses skip it and regret it in December.
Carriers publish holiday mail-by and cutoff dates in the fall, and your store's promises have to match them. Work backward: take the carrier's cutoff for each service you offer, subtract a day or two of your own processing time, and publish that as your order cutoff. If your checkout still says "order by December 20 for Christmas delivery" while the carrier's cutoff was December 18, every order placed on the 19th and 20th is a refund or a chargeback waiting to happen.
Say it in dates, not service names. Customers don't know what "Xpresspost" means for their timeline, but they understand "order by December 15 for delivery by Christmas." And set different cutoffs for different regions. Remote and northern addresses need earlier deadlines; a single national date will break for exactly those customers who are hardest to recover.
| Prep item | When to do it | Why it matters |
|---|---|---|
| Carrier accounts | October | Backup carrier when the primary slows or surcharges bite |
| Weigh and measure every SKU | October | Accurate labels now, no postage adjustments later |
| Holiday cutoff dates published | Early November | Customers plan around them; wrong dates create refunds |
| Peak surcharges reviewed | Before pricing the sale | Surcharges change free-shipping math; price around them |
| Returns workflow decided | Before the sale | Higher return volume than normal; don't improvise in January |
| Packing help scheduled | November | Packing is the bottleneck; the label takes seconds |
Packing breaks first, not postage. Buying a label takes seconds; packing a hundred orders takes a crew. Line up help before the sale: a second pair of hands, a cleared packing table, and printed pick lists beat any clever software. If you usually pack alone, assume your per-order time doubles once volume spikes, because it will.
The second thing that breaks is your free-shipping threshold. Peak surcharges raise your per-parcel cost, so a threshold that was profitable in October can lose money in December. Recalculate it with peak costs in the model, and consider raising it for the season. The third is inventory: Black Friday oversells happen when the website count and the shelf count disagree. Freeze a safety buffer on your best sellers rather than selling to zero.
One last non-obvious point: post offices and drop-off points have their own holiday closures and early-closing days. A parcel packed on December 24 that misses the last pickup sits until the next business day, and in a short holiday week that gap is longer than it looks. Check the closure schedule for your usual drop-off point and plan the last shipping day around it, not around the carrier's general calendar.
Ready to ship it? Get a shipping label with LetterAgent: describe it to your AI assistant, approve the exact quoted price, and get your label.
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