Diwali 2026 falls on 8 November. A week-by-week Shopify checklist from late September: inventory, gifting collections, collection order, offers, checkout, delivery cut-offs and follow-up.
Diwali falls on 8 November this year, which from the last week of September gives a Shopify store about six working weeks. That is enough time to do everything properly and not enough to do anything twice. Dhanteras and the days leading up to Diwali are when most of the orders land; the weeks before are when they are won or lost, in stock decisions, collection pages and the small operational details that decide whether a gift arrives on time.
This checklist is written for a founder or e-commerce manager running a D2C store in India, but most of it applies to anyone selling into the festive season. Take it week by week. Each week has one theme, because trying to do all of it in the last fortnight is how stores end up discounting products they cannot ship.
Week 1 (late September): inventory and the catalogue audit
Start with stock, because every later decision depends on it. Pull sell-through for the last twelve months, look at what happened around Diwali last year, and decide what you are actually going to push. The temptation is to bet on everything. Do not. Pick the products that have depth of stock, healthy margin and good photography, and treat them as the festival range.
- Confirm purchase orders and supplier lead times now; anything not committed by early October is unlikely to arrive in time to be photographed, listed and sold.
- Fix cost per item on every product you plan to promote. Without it you cannot see margin, and festive discounting without margin visibility is guesswork.
- Clean the catalogue: retire dead variants, correct titles and tags, and make sure every product has at least one image that works as a gift.
- Turn inventory tracking on for the whole festival range, so that sold-out variants are actually marked sold out on the storefront.
Week 2: gifting collections and the order of the page
Festive shoppers browse differently. Many are buying for someone else, on a budget, often on a phone in the evening. They need collections that answer the question they arrived with: gifts under a price point, gifts for a parent, for a colleague, for a new home, corporate orders. Build these now as their own collections with their own URLs, so that search engines have a few weeks to index them and ads have something specific to land on.
Then look at the order of the products inside each one. On a phone the first four to six products decide whether the shopper stays. Default 'best selling' will put last year's winners on top, including the ones that have since sold out. In our experience the order that works for a festive collection is a composition: in-stock products with strong recent conversion in the first row, fresh festival pieces next, and the rest ranked by revenue. That is precisely what we built SellRank at LeelaRam Technologies to do on a schedule, but even done by hand in Shopify's manual sort it is worth an hour per collection.
- Create a top-level Diwali or festive collection and link it from the main navigation, not just the homepage banner.
- Build price-band gifting collections in round INR figures that match how people actually budget.
- Put an in-stock condition on the top of every festive collection and keep sold-out items lower on the page rather than deleting them.
- Write short, honest collection descriptions; they are the text search engines use to understand the page.
Week 3: offers, pricing and invoices that hold up
Decide the offer structure in week three, not on the eve of the sale. A festive offer needs to be simple enough to explain in a WhatsApp message and clean enough to survive a GST audit. Percentage discounts on a defined collection, a free gift above a cart value, or bundled sets are all easy to configure and easy to account for. Stacking three mechanics on top of each other is where checkout bugs and customer complaints come from.
- Test every discount code and automatic discount on a real order in a test environment, including how it displays on the invoice.
- Check that the GST rate and HSN code on each product are correct, particularly on bundles where components carry different rates.
- Set the offer dates in Shopify's discount scheduling rather than relying on someone remembering to switch it off.
- Prepare a price list for corporate or bulk gifting enquiries, with GST shown separately, so the sales conversation does not stall on paperwork.
Week 4: checkout, payments and the delivery promise
A festive order that arrives after Diwali is a refund waiting to happen. Work backwards from 8 November with your courier partners and decide the last order date for standard delivery to each zone you serve. Publish it on the product page, in the cart and in the order confirmation. Shoppers do not mind a cut-off; they mind discovering it after paying.
Serviceability matters as much as speed. Check which pincodes your couriers will actually deliver to in festival week, whether cash on delivery is available there, and what the COD limit is, then make sure the checkout reflects it. A customer who pays for a gift to a pincode nobody serves is a refund, a complaint and a lost recipient in one order.
- Confirm courier capacity and pick-up schedules for the last two weeks before Diwali; many carriers run reduced pickups around the festival itself.
- Enable UPI, cards, wallets and cash on delivery where your margins allow it, and check that each one completes on a phone, not just a laptop.
- Add gift options at checkout: a gift message field, gift wrapping as a paid add-on, and the ability to hide prices on the packing slip.
- Run a full test order through payment, fulfilment and the customer emails, and read every message as the customer would.
Week 5: customer service and the dress rehearsal
Order volume in festival week can be several times a normal week, and the questions are predictable: where is my order, can I change the address, will it arrive by Diwali, can I get an invoice in a company name. Write the answers now. Put them on a visible FAQ page, in the order confirmation email, and in the canned replies for whoever is answering WhatsApp and email.
Then rehearse. Pick a quiet weekday, load the site on a mid-range Android phone over mobile data, and buy something. Check the collection order, the sold-out badges, the discount, the delivery message, the payment, the confirmation email and the tracking link. Whatever annoys you will annoy a hundred customers.
- Decide who covers support on the two weekends before Diwali and on the day itself.
- Set expectations for response time on WhatsApp and stick to them, even if that means a slower promise than usual.
- Prepare a returns and exchange note specific to gifts, since the recipient is often not the buyer.
Week 6 and festival week: run it and adjust
By the last week of October the store should be in its festival configuration and your job becomes watching and adjusting. Refresh collection order at least daily, hourly if volume allows, so that products selling out fall down the page before they hit zero. Watch which gifting collections are converting and move ad spend towards them. Watch stock cover on the hero products and be ready to pull an offer on anything with a few days of stock left.
Resist the urge to launch new offers mid-week. Every change to pricing or discount rules during peak volume is a chance to break checkout for an hour you cannot get back. If a product is underperforming, move it on the page or shift ad spend; if a product is flying, protect its stock rather than discounting it further. The plan you made in weeks three and four is usually better than the one you improvise on a busy Thursday.
Keep a short daily log: what you changed, when, and what happened to orders and conversion afterwards. It takes five minutes and it is the only reliable memory you will have when planning next year.
After Diwali: the follow-up most stores skip
The days after the festival are unusually quiet, and that is the moment to do the work that compounds. Revert sale collections to their normal order, remove expired offers, and email or message customers with something that is not a discount: a thank-you, a care guide for what they bought, a request for a review. First-time festival buyers are the most valuable list you will build all year, and the difference between a one-time gift purchase and a repeat customer is usually whether anyone spoke to them again in December.
- Compare each festive collection's order against the previous version: views, add-to-carts and orders while each was live.
- Record what sold out, what did not move and which price band performed, while the numbers are still fresh.
- Reconcile GST on discounted and bundled orders before the return is due, rather than in a panic later.
- Book the retrospective with whoever ran support and fulfilment; their notes are the real plan for Diwali 2027.
