How to sell Christmas gift hampers online from a theme to the last order date

TL;DR

• • Theme first. Six themes below; pick two, not six.
• • Price all-in. Contents + box + courier is your floor; keep at least a third of the price above it.
• • Three sizes catch three budgets. Example: ₹899, ₹1,499, ₹2,499.
• • Build-your-own page is free on SitesPlaced: buyer picks, you pack one hamper, priced by number of items.
• • Corporate orders: a “box of 25” product plus WhatsApp and a UPI advance. No quote button exists; don’t wait for one.
• • Last order date around 16–18 December for courier, 23 December for local. Announce it, then pause ordering.

1. Pick a theme a buyer can picture

A hamper sells when the buyer can imagine the moment it is opened. “Assorted gift box” gives them nothing to imagine. “Christmas evening box” does. Name the moment, then fill the box with what belongs in it. Here are six themes that fit December in India, with the kind of buyer each attracts.

A rule that holds across themes: one thing to eat, one thing to keep, one thing that smells good. A box that is all food is finished in a day; a box with a candle or a mug in it is remembered. Pick two themes for your first season. Every extra theme is another set of suppliers, boxes and photos.

2. Source the contents

• Make what you are good at, buy the rest. If you bake, your plum cake is the hero and everything else is bought. If you make candles, the candle is the hero. A hamper of eight homemade things is eight production lines in your kitchen in the busiest fortnight of the year.
• Buy from other small makers. A home baker in your city will sell you forty 200 g cakes at a wholesale price and be glad of the order. The same goes for candle makers, chocolatiers and soap makers. Agree the price and the delivery date in writing on WhatsApp.
• Check dates before you buy food. Anything packaged should have a best-before date well past 1 January. Ask for it before paying, not when the carton arrives.
• Order boxes before anything else. Printers and box suppliers are busy from mid-November. If you want a printed sleeve or a sticker with your name, order it in the first week of November. Plain kraft boxes with a ribbon and a good sticker look fine and arrive faster.
• Buy for the orders you have, plus a small buffer. Because a hamper is assembled, you do not need forty complete hampers on a shelf. You need the parts for the hampers people have ordered, and enough extra for a week of new orders.

3. Price with the box and courier already inside

The mistake new hamper sellers make is pricing the contents and treating the box and the courier as afterthoughts. They are not small: between them they can be a quarter of the landed cost. Work out the landed cost (what one finished, delivered hamper costs you) and price above it. The table is a worked example with made-up numbers for one theme in three sizes.

Example figures only. Your contents, box and courier costs will differ; the method is what matters.

Notice two things. The “left for you” column still has to pay the payment gateway’s charge, the odd damaged parcel, and your evenings. Keep it at a third of the price or more. And the large hamper leaves the most money for the same amount of your time, so make the large one look like the obvious choice in your photos. The profit margin calculator turns these into percentages if you prefer them.

Whether you show delivery inside the price or as a separate line is a choice. Showing “₹1,499, delivery included” reads well for gifts, because the buyer is not the one receiving the parcel and does not want to think about it. If you do charge delivery separately, set a flat delivery charge under Settings → Shipping and a Free delivery above amount so that a two-hamper order ships free; the cart then shows an “add ₹X more for free delivery” bar, which nudges buyers to the bigger box. How to set shipping charges covers the choice.

4. The build-your-own hamper page (free)

Fixed hampers are easier to pack. But some buyers want to choose, especially when the gift is for someone with allergies, a sweet tooth or no sweet tooth. On SitesPlaced you can offer both without any extra cost: your fixed hampers as products, and a build-your-own page where the buyer picks the items and you pack them into one hamper.

1. In your store dashboard, open Settings → Sales boosters and find the Build your own hamper card. Turn it on.
2. Give the page a title and an intro line, such as “Choose the things they’ll love, and we’ll pack them into one hamper.”
3. Choose which categories a buyer can pick from. Put your hamper-friendly products (small cakes, cookies, candles, mugs, jars) in those categories; leave fragile or oversized items out.
4. Set the fewest and most items in a hamper. The defaults are 3 and 8.
5. Pick a packaging product: your box, with its own price, which is added to every hamper automatically. Create it as a product first.
6. Turn on the photo and note if you want the buyer to add a picture for a card or a message, and label the note (“Message for the card”).
7. Set hamper prices by number of items: for example, 3 items for ₹899, 5 for ₹1,499, 8 for ₹2,499. A buyer who picks a size you did not price pays the cheapest combination of the sizes you did, and never more than the items would cost on their own. If a product comes in sizes, you can also name which options are allowed in a hamper, so only the 100 g jar goes in, not the 500 g one.

The page lives at yourbrand.sitesplaced.site/build-your-hamper (or on your own domain on Starter). In the cart, the hamper shows as one card with its contents listed, and the quantities inside it are fixed, so a buyer removes the whole hamper rather than breaking it up. If the buyer orders on WhatsApp, the message you receive lists the hamper and every item in it. You pack exactly what you see.

5. Corporate and office orders

One office order can equal a month of single sales. Companies gift at Christmas and New Year to staff, clients and vendors, and the person placing the order is usually an HR or admin person with a budget per head and a date. They want a price, a photo and a reply the same day. How to pitch, bulk price slabs, GST invoices and delivery to many addresses are covered in corporate gifting orders for small businesses. Here is how to take the order on your store, honestly.

• There is no per-product minimum quantity and no “request a quote” button. (A minimum order value for the whole cart does exist, under Settings → Checkout.) Don’t describe a quote button to a buyer. Instead, list the set as its own product: “Office Christmas hamper, box of 25” at the bulk price, with a product description that says what is inside and the delivery window.
• Use personalisation for the details. On that product, turn on the text note and label it “Message for the cards and any names”. The buyer’s note arrives on the order.
• Move the conversation to WhatsApp. With WhatsApp checkout on (it is free), the buyer can send the order to you as a WhatsApp message and you sort out addresses, logo stickers and dates in the chat. On Growth, the WhatsApp chat bubble puts that conversation one tap away on every page.
• Take an advance. Ask for half by UPI before you buy stock, or set up a coupon code worth the advance so the buyer pays the balance through the store and the order is recorded properly.
• Invoices. Every order has a PDF invoice you can download from the Orders tab. If the company needs GST on it, your store details under Settings → Payments & invoices should carry your GSTIN; whether you need to be registered is a question for a CA.

6. Last order dates, and how to run them

A hamper that arrives on 27 December is a refund waiting to happen. Set your cut-offs now and work backwards from Wednesday 23 December, the last sensible delivery day before Christmas.

• Courier to other cities: ask your courier (Shiprocket or Shipmozo both connect to a SitesPlaced store) for December transit times to your main destinations, add one day of slack and one day to pack, and you get a cut-off around 16 to 18 December for most of India. Remote pincodes need a week more.
• Local hand delivery: you can take orders until 23 December if you can deliver yourself or through a local rider.
• New Year hampers: reopen on 26 December for delivery by 31 December locally, and by courier only if your transit time allows.

On your store, write the dates in the announcement bar (Settings → Branding), the strip at the top of every page: “Courier orders close 17 December. Local delivery until 23 December.” You can add extra lines that rotate, so one line can carry the dates and another the offer. When you hit the cut-off, tick Pause ordering under Settings → Checkout and write your own heading and message: “Christmas orders are closed. We reopen on 26 December for New Year hampers.” Shoppers can still browse, their carts are saved, and nobody can place an order you cannot deliver.

To be clear: there is no pre-order or delivery-slot feature. Orders you take in December are normal orders with a promised window written in the description and the announcement bar. That is enough, as long as you keep the promise.

7. Packing, payment and the two things that go wrong

Hampers fail in two ways: the parcel arrives crushed, or a cash-on-delivery order is refused at the door and comes back to you after the festival. For the first, use a rigid outer carton one size up from the hamper box, fill every gap, and put glass in the centre, never against a wall. Packaging and gift-wrapping ideas on a budget has the details and they do not change for Christmas.

For the second, decide your COD rule before December. A returned ₹1,499 hamper costs you the courier both ways and a box of food you cannot resell. Many hamper sellers take prepaid only, or allow COD with an extra COD charge (Settings → Checkout) so that the buyer who insists on cash pays for the risk. COD or prepaid for festive orders works through the decision with numbers.

What it costs to run this on SitesPlaced

Nothing, to start. A SitesPlaced store is free with 0% commission: unlimited products and orders, UPI and cards through your own Razorpay, PhonePe or Cashfree account, cash on delivery, WhatsApp checkout, coupons with an expiry date, the free-delivery bar, the build-your-own hamper page, per-product personalisation with paid extras such as gift wrap, product badges, invoices and the Shiprocket and Shipmozo connections. The Gifts & Lifestyle Store template is one of 16 free templates; best gift shop website templates compares them.

Your own domain, such as yourbrand.com, comes with Starter: ₹199 a month, or pay ₹199 once for 30 days with no autopay, or ₹1,990 once for a year. Starter also removes the SitesPlaced badge, adds analytics, and makes your store’s pages answer about 4× faster than on the free plan: about 75 ms instead of about 330 ms, measured on live paid stores on 28 September 2026. “Answer” means how soon the page starts arriving, before the photos load. Growth (₹499 a month, or ₹4,990 once for a year) adds Buy X Get Y offers, the WhatsApp chat bubble and product reviews with Google star ratings. The code FREE7 gives 7 days free on Starter or Growth when you set up autopay; cancel before the first charge and you pay nothing. Everything else for the season is on the Christmas and New Year page for sellers.

Frequently asked questions