Printful’s 2020 Holiday Order Deadlines

Holiday order deadlines are important to share with your customers so they know the cutoff time to place their orders for the best bet to get their packages by December 25. Here’s how you can share order deadlines:

1. Take a look at the order-by dates and see which apply to the products you’re selling
2. Make a marketing plan to figure out when you need to promote buying certain products with the soonest deadlines
3. Go over our holiday order deadlines guide to get ideas for marketing
4. Post the order deadlines in your product descriptions for each respective product

We can’t promise our holiday order deadlines won’t change, especially given this is the industry’s first holiday season happening during a pandemic, but we’ll work our hardest to ensure the deadlines stay the same. To read more about how we’re preparing for this year’s holiday season, take a look at our fulfillment updates page. We may recalculate the deadlines for the following reasons:

• if our fulfillment times fall behind or are faster than we estimated
• if fulfillment is affected by unexpected events like severe weather
• if some of our carriers change their projections or experience delays

In case we update our deadlines, you’ll see a red badge next to the dates, and we’ll also inform you via email, so make sure you’ve set your email notifications to receive those.

Our fulfillment times may increase for reasons we can’t predict. That being said, we’ll work our hardest to keep our fulfillment times consistent by taking actions to manage incoming order volume, like limiting new product push. For more info, visit our fulfillment updates page.

We’re preparing however we can, but we can’t control carrier shipping speeds. We’ll continue to follow the news and monitor the situation. We also recommend you follow carrier service alerts to see if there are any delays.

In case we change our deadlines, you’ll see a red badge next to the dates, and we’ll email you, so set your email notifications to receive those.

While it’s a great sales strategy to go for the last-minute holiday shoppers, know that holiday shopping will start earlier this year, so plan your sales campaigns earlier as well. If you want to extend your sales period, then selling products with the furthest order deadlines will get you the last-minute shopper market. Here’s how:

1. Offer and promote Express shipping after deadlines for Standard shipping have passed. Express shipping is available for stores with enabled live rates, but you can place your orders manually and access this shipping method during checkout! If you ship your products with Express shipping, consider raising the shipping costs on your storefront.
2. See which products have the furthest order-by dates and consider selling them as last-minute holiday gifts.
3. Pre-order your best-selling products in bulk and store them in Printful’s warehouses. Products fulfilled with our Warehousing & Fulfillment services have order-by dates that are closer to the holidays. That’s because we offer same-day fulfillment for orders containing products from the warehouse.

There might be cases where you have to troubleshoot delays or issues with orders. We recommend:

1. Filling out a problem report if your shipment arrived damaged or was lost in transit
2. Going over our Return Policy to learn more about returned orders
3. Reading our Printful Policies Your Store Should Copy blog to get free policy templates and talking points to use with your customers

Our order deadlines are different for each shipping region because of local carrier delivery estimates, our product availability, and stock levels at the nearest fulfillment centers.

Our order deadlines also vary based on product category fulfillment estimates. For example, it usually takes us longer to create apparel products than non-apparel ones. Our order deadlines for warehoused products are later in the month than those for printed on-demand because we don’t have to factor in fulfillment time for warehouse items—they’re already made and ready to ship.

If we receive an order that contains products that have passed their order-by dates, we’ll do our best to get in touch with you to see if you’ll want to ship those products separately. That’ll ensure the product with current deadlines has a better chance to arrive before the holidays. Know that splitting products into shipments will add up in additional costs. To estimate those costs, see How do I calculate shipping costs for orders with products that ship separately.