Ashley Alderson breaks down USPS holiday shipping deadlines for retail. The cutoff is December 18, but treat December 16 as your real deadline. Run a flash sale December 17, then pivot to gift cards December 18-24 to catch last-minute shoppers.
Questions this episode answers
December 18, 2024.
Treat it like December 16, 2024.
The day before the USPS cutoff (i.e., the day before December 18).
December 18–24, 2024.
Foreign.
Business can be a lonely game, but it doesn't have to be. Welcome to Boutique Chat where we explore community over competition and how to scale your company with the balance and the happiness that we all seek. We'll hear from product based businesses of all types, retailers, E commerce and wholesale brands, along with industry experts shaping the future of our industry. I'm your host Ashley Alderson from the Boutique Hub and I can't wait to chat.
Hey, I'm back a quick five minute Friday and it's the holiday version. So I hope these quick tips and these five minute Fridays have been super helpful for you just to find ways to be more profitable and more successful this holiday season. Today's tip is all about the USPS shipping cutoff date, which is one of the very first dates you should mark down in your marketing calendar when it comes to the fourth quarter. As you're planning out all of your promotions and your events and your social media and your emails, you have such an opportunity to capitalize on this cutoff date and what's going to happen leading up to it and what's going to happen after it. This year, the USPS shipping cutoff date in 2024 is December 18th. So that tells me that any online promotions that I'm going to do for online bundling, online gifting, whatever I am going to ship from my warehouse, from my website has to happen by December 18th for anyone to receive it by the holidays. Now let's just say this. We all know that the USPS is a bit of a, you know, well, unpredictable animal. We'll just say that. And so when they say it's December 18th, I'm really going to live like it's probably December 16th. I'm going to give myself a little bit of cutoff, a little bit of leeway because I don't want to disappoint my customers this holiday season. So again, any online promotions I really want to ramp up knowing that that December 18th 18th cutoff date is looming. I would also really want to make sure that the day before this cutoff. So if you're going to go with December 18th or you're going to bump it up a couple of days, the day before is the day that I would have a massive flash sale website only. So if I have any Santa socks, holiday T shirts, holiday giftables, things that are wrapped and pre wrapped in Christmas colors, I would significantly mark those things down before December 18, make them a flash sale and get them out the door. This would also tell me that in store promotions would need to match because I only have a couple of days right between December 18th and really Christmas Eve the 24th to get those gifts out the door. So make sure you have a plan for the markdowns. They're going to match up with that USPS shipping cutoff date. Now here's the opportunity that comes after holiday sales aren't dead. Once your products are sold for the season, this is where you have a huge opportunity to capitalize on gift cards. So it's time to run a gift card sale December 18th to December 24th where maybe it's like a bogo, right? Like if you spend a gift card, you get a gift card. I see that in a lot of restaurants over the holiday season. It could be a gift with purchase with a gift card purchase. But just remind your customers that gift cards are available, how easy they are to access and the special and promotion you're going to run. You can still make someone look like a genius by putting a gift card in their hands and making that the giftable over the holiday season. So get ready, get prepared, set those marketing dates now. Use December 18, the USPS shipping cutoff date to your advantage this season. That's it for this five minute Friday holiday version. Hopefully going to make you a lot more profitable this holiday season. Thanks for tuning in you guys. Make sure you subscribe and leave a review for this podcast anywhere you listen to it. And as always, AJ Alderson is my personal Instagram. I would love to hear what you're doing while you listen to the show or reach out with ideas or feedback or guest suggestions anytime. I would love to hear from you. All right, that's it. Talk to you soon.
Thanks for listening guys. I hope you took away all kinds of nuggets and new ideas from this week's episode. Don't forget to subscribe and leave a rating and review. We love to hear your feedback and give you a chance to be featured on the show each and every week. For more information on our spirit of community over competition and to access guest downloads and bonuses and all the resources we talked about on the show, head on over to the boutiquehub.com and join the community. We'll see you next week.
