What Christmas Order Deadline Should You Display?

Display one date per delivery method, calculated backward: the carrier's last guaranteed date, minus your December processing time, minus a safety margin.

Show the same date everywhere, starting in early December.

The benchmark

Each carrier publishes its deadlines for delivery before December 24, usually during November.

In 2025, Colissimo set the drop-off deadline at Saturday, December 20 for delivery at D+2 (two days after drop-off), Monday the 22nd for D+1, and Tuesday the 23rd for same-day. Mondial Relay doesn't publish a date and recommends allowing a week.

Start from these dates, method by method, and subtract the time an order takes to leave your warehouse during peak season, which is longer than in an ordinary month.

Then check that your site isn't telling three different stories.

At a rainwear brand the authors work with, product pages promised "within 48 hours," the FAQ said "2 to 3 business days," and a piece of code calculated a third date under the buy button.

These delivery times had been written at different moments, by different hands, and every redesign leaves this kind of sediment behind. The result showed up in customer service, with missed expectations and a rise in contacts. The fix comes down to one setting: a single text reused everywhere, which you update every day during the last week.

The rule

Display one date per delivery method, and treat each one as a commitment.

The French Consumer Code requires you to deliver by the stated date, and if delivery before Christmas was the condition of the purchase, the customer can cancel once the date has passed and must be refunded within fourteen days.

The day after each deadline, the message changes: this method will no longer arrive in time, here's what is still possible.

The steps

1. Carrier dates. Note them as soon as they're published.
2. Your processing time. Measure it on last December, order by order.
3. The displayed date. Put it on the product page, in the cart, in a banner and in the confirmation email, and prefer a date to a time frame: "delivered by December 23" beats "ships within 48 hours."
4. The update. Do it every day during the last week.
5. The gift card. Get it ready to take over: sent by email when the order ships, with a visual, and a send date you can schedule up to 90 days ahead on Shopify.

A sentence to say to your leadership on December 1, to adapt to your delivery methods:

"One date per delivery method, the same on the product page, the cart, the FAQ and the email. If two pages say two different things, customers will believe the slower one."

The trap

A single date for all methods doesn't work: too cautious, and it stops your sales three days too early; too optimistic, and it produces gifts delivered on the 27th. And for pickup points, the package's arrival doesn't end the story.

Two cofounders of a ready-to-wear brand told the authors about it on a Friday in December:

"We don't email customers to tell them, hey, your package has arrived at the Mondial Relay point. They only get an email from our logistics provider, with no link to the brand, and it often lands in spam. So now we have tons of emails: where is my order? The thing is, the order only stays five days at Mondial Relay. It gets sent back to us, and we have to ship it out again at our own expense."

The package had arrived on time, but nobody knew.

The other oversight is the gift card, the only product that can still be delivered on the evening of the 24th, and one that many sites bury at the bottom of the menu.

At a winter accessories brand, the gift card page got about a hundred visits in three months, for a single purchase. From the last deadline on, give it top billing on the homepage.