Holiday Fulfillment in 2025: 10 Tactics for Shipping, Delivery Dates, and Returns

US online holiday sales reached $241.4 billion last year. Shopify merchants claimed a huge piece of that pie: they saw a record-breaking $11.5 billion in sales during the Black Friday and Cyber Monday weekend, with over 91 million packages tracked globally on the Shop App.

But for those holiday orders to make their way from a retailer’s warehouse into a customer’s hands, the complex holiday fulfillment process needs to be handled strategically—even when impacted by supply chain pressure and peak-season demands. 

In 2025, expectations are even higher during the busiest time of the year. This article shows how to manage the holiday-fulfillment trifecta—inventory management, shipping, and returns—to set clear delivery promises, leverage 3PL networks, and cut returns while keeping holiday fulfillment profitable.

Master product sourcing to avoid holiday stockouts

Holiday retail sales crossed the billion-dollar mark last year, which is encouraging for the upcoming season. But what happens if you sell out all of your inventory unexpectedly? You can avoid it by using these strategies. 

1. Forecast demand with greater accuracy

Demand soars during the holiday season as consumers stock up on gifts and take advantage of Black Friday offers. This presents a risk for retailers: around 62% worry about stockouts driving customers away.

It’s a stark possibility. Per the same report, 94% of consumers say product availability is a critical factor when shopping for holiday gifts. Seven in ten have abandoned their entire cart when even just one item was out of stock. 

Deploy demand-forecasting methods to create a merchandising plan that strikes the right balance between under- and overstocking:

• Use wishlists. Let customers express their interest in products with a wishlist app. Gymshark, for example, encourages holiday shoppers to create an account to assemble their wishlist before their Black Friday sale drops. This not only helps analyze demand for each product but also collects holiday customer data for future retargeting.
• Encourage signups for product drops. If you’re launching a new product or flash sale over the holidays, gauge demand by requiring customers to share their email address in exchange for access. This can earn you valuable zero-party data as well as helping you prep for a rush of sales—all while drumming up anticipation for your holiday product drop. 
• Leverage AI-based demand-forecasting tools. Combine historical data from previous holiday sales with external data—such as market trends, consumer behavior, and weather forecasts—to see whether macro factors will impact holiday demand. 

2. Automate restocking for optimized inventory management 

Keeping inventory levels up to date can be tough on high-volume holiday shopping days when your team is busy. That’s where ecommerce automation is helpful. 

Shopify Flow automates nearly any customer-facing or back-office process you can imagine. It stores and executes triggers, conditions, and actions you specify—across both native Shopify features and integrated apps—with a simple drag-and-drop interface that doesn’t require any coding.

For example, you can use holiday automation workflows to:

• Receive a Slack notification when inventory falls below safety stock levels
• Raise purchase orders with the appropriate supplier based on safety stock levels and lead times 
• Automatically remove products from your site to avoid disappointing customers because of stockouts;
• Email customers who have added a popular product to their cart but not completed purchase to let them know the product is almost sold out
• Notify your customer service team when a customer requests a refund over a certain dollar amount
• Flag and cancel high-risk orders, then restock the item and send a notification to the customer 

💡Tip: Cash flow can be a challenge for retailers who need to quickly source and receive inventory during the busy holiday season. Pashion Footwear experienced this firsthand, and turned to Shopify Capital to airship 20% of their inventory instead of relying on slower water shipping. The result? A 375% growth in holiday sales compared to the year prior. 

“I'm not confident we would have been able to bring in our holiday shipment [without Shopify Capital],” says Pashion’s CEO and founder Haley Pavone. “Capital was vital in getting us the holiday inventory on hand that we needed to support that 375% sales growth. I don’t think we would have seen anything close to that growth figure without it.”

3. Create a backup plan for stockouts

Inventory issues are sometimes unavoidable. Whether your demand plan was skewed or a supplier fails to provide inventory in time, create a backup plan to retain customers you’d otherwise lose to a stockout:

• Source backup suppliers. If your main supplier runs out or faces shipping delays, secondary or regional suppliers offer backup. Negotiate contingency contracts that let you place emergency orders without penalty.
• Use waitlists or “notify me” apps. Add a “Notify me when back in stock” button to product pages. Integrate this data with your demand-planning system to adjust forecasts in real time, then automate back-in-stock campaigns that email customers to convert holiday shoppers once inventory returns.
• Offer alternatives. Use your recommendation engine to surface substitute SKUs automatically—for example, items in a similar color, size, or price point to the one that’s out of stock. 
• Use preorders. If a demand plan falls through, ask customers to pay for holiday purchases up front. This preorder model gives you the cash flow to restock inventory and the data to know exactly how many units you need to order.

"Anybody who is running a rapidly growing inventory-based business knows that getting ahead of cash for new product lines that have a significant investment can be hard to catch up," says Sarah Resnick, founder of Gist Yarn, on a Shopify Masters episode. 

“It's hard to make the cash flow that you need to launch something new. It's expensive. Preorders have let us do that. It's our customers investing in us and getting yarn back.”

Consider shipping timelines and expectations for holiday fulfillment

The next step in fulfilling a customer order is, of course, to pack and deliver it. Since shipping can be extra stressful amidst the holiday rush as carriers face lengthy shipping delays and fulfillment teams are stretched, let’s look at holiday shipping strategies to keep customers happy.

4. Set free-shipping thresholds

Free shipping is far from free for retailers, especially during the holiday season when carriers inflate costs to account for higher demand. But it’s often a necessary cost to absorb; 42% of consumers say free shipping influences their holiday purchasing decisions.

To avoid tanking profits unnecessarily, determine what your free shipping threshold needs to be in order to maintain a profit. Look at your median and average order values (MOV and AOV)—the threshold should be set high enough above your MOV or AOV to encourage customers to spend more. 

Communicate this threshold throughout the buying experience by advertising it in promotional emails, on your homepage, in-cart, and at checkout. This keeps customers from jumping ship when they see an unexpected shipping fee at checkout—and gives them incentive to add more to their cart while they’re still browsing.

Additionally, you can pre-bundle or build a kit of items that are frequently bought together, based on purchase histories and trends. This will save time and increase the percentage of orders that ship in flat rate containers. For holiday shopping, build special pre-bundled holiday gift sets, like a pair of gloves and a matching scarf.

Apparel brand Knix offers bundles where you get a discount for purchasing a bra and three pairs of underwear together. They offer free shipping for orders over $100, so many of their sets automatically qualify.

5. Provide timely delivery based on geography 

Naturally, the further away a customer is, the more expensive it is to ship. 

If your one fulfillment center is based in LA, for example, you’re going to spend a lot to ship to New York City. But if you use multiple centers across the country, perhaps with a third-party logistics (3PL) provider, and package your items in flat-rate containers, you can save more money.

Outsourcing your shipping to a 3PL with a network of fulfillment centers—across the country or globe—will help you slash shipping costs and lift profit margins. You’ll also get those packages out faster, and offload the time and stress of managing logistics in-house.

Here are some of the ways 3PLs can help with holiday fulfillment:

• They handle large shipment volumes for thousands of businesses to offer discounted shipping rates with all carriers and services.
• You can use your own custom-branded boxes or use the 3PL’s standard boxes, packing expertise, and dimensional weight optimization.
• There’s no need for you to invest in the infrastructure to ship globally.
• You also don’t have to pay for warehouse equipment, utilities, technology, staff, or worry about complying with regulations and obtaining the right licenses—3PLs take responsibility for all of these requirements.
• You can optimize where you store your inventory within the 3PL’s fulfillment network, and more easily expand into new markets with last-mile delivery.

Taking so much of the holiday fulfillment logistics off your plate lets you focus more time on things like marketing your holiday gift ideas to boost sales—know those additional orders will be filled accurately and on time.

💡Tip: Shopify Fulfillment Network connects your online store to leading logistics partners—including Flexport, Shipbob, Amazon, DHL, and ShipMonk—to outsource holiday fulfillment. It passes order data from Shopify directly to your preferred 3PL who handles picking, packing, and shipping. 

6. Offer omnichannel fulfillment for last-minute orders 

It’s not just free delivery that holiday shoppers demand—most also want their orders to arrive quickly. Negotiate with shipping carriers to offer multiple shipping options, like free 2 to 3-day shipping or premium expedited shipping (less than 1 day). 

If your fulfillment team or shipping partners can’t commit to same-day shipping but you operate retail locations, use those stores as mini fulfillment centers. Enable customers to buy online, pick up in-store (BOPIS—sometimes also known as click and collect) to save inventory in your main shipping warehouses and offer timely holiday shipping. When you help someone out of a last-minute gift-shopping bind, you’ve earned a grateful—and potentially loyal–customer. 

Parachute, for example, relies on Shopify’s unified data model to offer BOPIS. They list nearby stores where the items in their cart are available for collection. This gives shoppers the convenience of immediate collection with BOPIS, while also enabling the Parachute team to upsell and personalize the customer experience in-store. Shopify’s unified data platform ensures in-store associates have customers’ shopping history on-hand, and can anticipate what they are looking for.

“Being able to leverage Shopify's buy online, pick up in store feature actually allows us to tell our online customers that we even have stores," says Meg Marsh, Parachute’s SVP of operations. "This allows us to drive traffic to the stores where we know that customers have a really great experience.”

It’s a holiday fulfillment strategy that’s paid off for Parachute. They’ve saved over $1 million in annual operational costs since migrating to Shopify, and processed 1,300 BOPIS orders in the final quarter of 2024 alone, representing 35% of all orders opting for this fulfillment method. 

7. Show expected delivery dates pre-purchase

Customers are likely to abandon their carts when they find out they won’t receive their package on time during the holidays. 

But abandoned carts are the lesser of evils when compared to customers becoming enraged after-purchase when their order doesn’t arrive on time. When that happens, a customer’s trust in your business is broken, and they may never shop with you again. If an item added to cart on that day won’t arrive on time, customers need to know immediately.

To solve this problem, find estimated shipping times for each shipping partner. Here’s a shortcut for the most popular:

• UPS
• USPS
• FedEx

Next, enable automated delivery dates in Shopify. Plug the timeframes from your carrier to set customer expectations on key touchpoints across your online store, including:

• Announcement bars
• Product pages
• Checkout
• Holiday marketing emails

💡Tip: You might need to adjust order-processing times—the time between receiving and fulfilling a customer’s order—in your Shopify admin to account for a peak season rush. A strong inventory management strategy can also help you optimize your warehouse, staffing, and picking and packing operations in order to absorb the influx with minimal slowdown.

8. Enable real-time order tracking

Your job isn’t over once a customer’s order leaves your warehouse. McKinsey found around half of customers check the tracking status of their order as they wait for it to arrive. The Shop app puts this level of insight within your customers’ reach. 

Provide complete tracking information for each order, including:

• The shipping carrier used—e.g., FedEx, UPS, or USPS
• A valid tracking number (given by the carrier)

Holiday shoppers will then see a link to download the Shop app on their order status page. After they create an account, order information from Shopify is automatically synced with the mobile app. This eliminates the need to check in with your holiday customer support team for “Where is my order?”-related questions that can burden an already overstretched department. 

Even if their order is delayed during the holiday season, send proactive updates to keep customers informed. Per the same McKinsey report, shoppers are more forgiving when ecommerce brands offer proactive customer communication—like alerting them of a delay and offering the option to modify or cancel their order. 

Manage the inevitable influx of holiday returns

The excitement and frenzy of Black Friday and Cyber Monday deals motivate many holiday shoppers to make impulse purchases they may second-guess later. Receiving a high number of cancellations and return requests just after those sales is, therefore, inevitable. 

According to NRF, return rates are 17% higher during the winter months than the year-round average. Here’s how to ease the burden.

9. Create a clear holiday returns policy

Policies might not sound like the most exciting part of the holiday season, but they set expectations up front and reduce the pressure on your customer service team.

A returns policy, in particular, acts as a point of reference—both before and after purchase—for shoppers to check whether they’re entitled to a refund, and if so, how to start the process. If you can’t accept their return, it’s because of your clearly stated policy—not your customer support associate playing the grinch. 

A clear policy can also protect you against the 9% of all return requests that are fraudulent. 

A holiday returns policy should include:

• Products that are (or aren’t) eligible for a return 
• Cutoff dates for returning holiday purchases 
• Return methods—for example, buy online, return in-store (BORIS)
• Refund types: gift cards, store credit, exchanges, etc.
• Instructions on how to initiate a return and average processing times

10. Build a self-serve returns portal

Holiday return requests can quickly overwhelm your team. A self-service portal allows customers to take matters into their own hands. They can sign into their account to initiate a return or exchange without waiting for assistance. 

Returns management platforms like Loop, Navar, and Returnly integrate with Shopify’s native order management system to let customers sign in, view previous orders, and select which items they want to return. 

When a customer generates a returns label from the self-service portal, returns data automatically feeds through to your warehouse. You’ll know exactly which SKUs are returning to which fulfillment center, helping you to restock inventory and quickly resell returned items—often before the holiday season ends.

Remember, just because they’re making a return doesn’t have to mean you’ve lost their business forever. Returns service is part of customer service—and when you make their lives easier, customers come away with a better view of your brand. Gestures like facilitating printing return delivery labels at home can go a long way. You can even offer options like in-store exchanges or store credit that can please customers and continue their engagement with your brand.

You can also attach a returns survey to this portal to uncover why people are returning holiday purchases. For example, if 40% of returned items were gifts that didn’t fit the recipient, add a sizing recommendation tool to product pages. You could also use a quiz to gather customer data and suggest the correct size, or promote one-size options instead.

💡Tip: If you’re outsourcing fulfillment, ask if your 3PL can handle reverse logistics to take this task off your plate. 

Make holiday fulfillment win-win

High sales growth over the holiday season is what every merchant wants. To close the deal, satisfy, and retain customers, you’ll need a strong holiday shipping and fulfillment strategy, including giving customers the information they need at every stage from browsing to post-purchase.

Make shipping free—even if you have to set the minimum order value a little higher. Or, bundle products to make the cost work in your favor. Make sure you can get packages to customers quickly and before the cut off date. It might mean outsourcing to a 3PL partner.

Finally, don’t forget to make returns easy and free when possible. At a minimum, provide a clear return policy, so customers are aware before they make an impulse purchase.