Christmas and New Year sale ideas: 8 offers that keep your margin

TL;DR

• • Know your profit per order before you touch a price. 20% off can halve it.
• • December: lift order size (free delivery above a value, gift sets, Buy 2 Get 1), not cut price.
• • Christmas week: free gift wrap, no discount. Buyers are late, not price-sensitive.
• • New Year: a code with a minimum order and an expiry, sent only to people who opted in.
• • January: a clearance at sale prices, ending on Republic Day.
• • Never discount: personalised items, priced hampers, your best seller in Christmas week, anything below landed cost.

First, see what a discount does to one order

Landed cost is what one delivered order costs you: the product, the box, the courier, the payment charge. Profit per order is the price minus that. Here is a worked example with made-up numbers: a product sold at ₹999 with a landed cost of ₹540 (product ₹420, box ₹40, courier ₹80), so ₹459 is left. Watch what each offer does to it.

Example figures only. The Buy 2 Get 1 row assumes the three units share one box and one courier.

Two lessons. A 20% discount needs nearly double the orders just to break even on profit. And Buy 2 Get 1 looks like a bigger discount but can leave you with more money per order, because three units share one courier. The discount calculator and the profit margin calculator let you run your own numbers before you announce anything.

1. A coupon with an expiry date and a cap

A coupon is a code the buyer types in the cart. The two settings that protect you are the expiry and the cap. Without an expiry, the code is screenshotted and used in March. Without a cap, a 15% code on a ₹4,999 hamper gives away ₹750 when you meant to give away ₹150.

On SitesPlaced, coupons live under Settings → Discounts and are free. Make the code, choose percent or flat, then open More rules: set Expires (the code works through the end of that day), a Minimum order value so it only fires on carts worth having, and Max discount to cap the rupees off a percentage code. You can limit it to one category, and untick Active the moment you want it gone. There is no total-uses cap, so the expiry and the minimum are your limits. Example: XMAS10, 10% off, minimum ₹999, max ₹150 off, expires 20 December.

2. Free delivery above a cart value

This is the offer most small sellers should run all December. The buyer sees “free delivery above ₹999”, their cart is at ₹749, and they add a candle. You pay the ₹80 courier you would have charged them, and you sell a candle you would not have sold. It costs you nothing on carts below the line.

Set a flat Delivery charge and a Free delivery above amount under Settings → Shipping. The moment both are set, the storefront shows a bar in the cart saying how much more to add for free delivery; the bar is free on every plan. Pick a threshold a little above what your buyers usually spend, so the nudge has somewhere to go. The threshold is checked on the cart before any coupon, so a coupon never takes free delivery away from someone who earned it. How to increase average order value goes deeper on picking the number.

3. Gift sets and bundles, priced as one product

A bundle is three things sold as one product for a little less than the three apart. It is not a discount feature; it is a product you create. “Christmas trio: candle, cookies, hot chocolate, ₹1,199” (the three cost ₹1,347 separately) feels generous, moves slower items alongside fast ones, and ships in one box. Photograph the set together, say what is in it, and give it a Gift Ready badge. If you sell hampers, the free build-your-own hamper page does this with the buyer choosing the contents.

4. Buy 2 Get 1 on the right products (Growth)

Buy X Get Y is an automatic offer: the buyer adds three, pays for two. It only works on things people genuinely want three of, which at Christmas means small gifts: candles, cookie boxes, socks, soaps, ornaments. Each buyer is shopping for several people, so three gifts is a natural order. It does not work on a single hero product; nobody needs three of the same cushion.

On SitesPlaced, Buy X Get Y is part of the Growth plan (₹499 a month, or ₹4,990 once for a year). Under Settings → Discounts, name the offer, set Buy quantity 2 and Get free 1, and choose the products or category. The discount is worked out on the server at checkout, so a tampered cart cannot claim it. Look at the margin table above before you switch it on: per unit it is a big cut, per order it can be a gain, and only if the three really do share a box.

5. An early-bird code, 1 to 10 December

The problem with Christmas is that every order lands in the same ten days. An early-bird code moves some of them earlier, which is worth money to you even at a small discount, because you pack calmly and your courier is not yet drowning. EARLY10, 10% off, max ₹150, expires 10 December, announced on your Instagram and in the announcement bar. When it expires, say so loudly; a code that ends on time teaches buyers to act on the next one.

6. Free gift wrap in Christmas week, no discount

From 21 December the buyer is late and has decided. Price is not what is stopping them; the worry is whether it will arrive and look like a gift. So stop discounting and remove the worry. If you sell gift wrapping as a paid extra on your products (set per product under Personalisation & extras), set it to ₹0 for the week and say “free gift wrap until 24 December” in the announcement bar. It costs you a sheet of paper and a ribbon and it is the difference between a sale and a marketplace order. Pair it with a clear last order date; the hamper guide shows how to run cut-offs with the announcement bar and pause ordering.

7. A New Year code with a minimum order

New Year gifting runs from 26 December to about 3 January and is often forgotten. A code such as NEWYEAR15, 15% off above ₹1,499, max ₹300, expiring on Sunday 3 January, gives that week its own reason to buy. Send it only to people who have chosen to hear from you: buyers who agreed to messages, people who saved your number, your email subscribers. A code blasted to strangers is spam; the same code to last month’s buyers is a thank you. Ready-to-copy messages are in Christmas and New Year WhatsApp messages for customers.

8. A January clearance, ending on Republic Day

Now the real markdowns. Anything Christmas-specific that is still on the shelf on 4 January (the first Monday of 2027) is worth more as cash than as stock you store until next December. Set a sale price on each product (the original price shows struck through), put them in a Clearance category so they have one page you can link to, and give the sale a hard end: Tuesday 26 January 2027. Republic Day is a public holiday and a day people shop, and a fixed end date is what makes a clearance work.

Whatever has not sold by then, archive. On SitesPlaced, Archive takes a product off the store without deleting it, and Restore to store brings it back in November. Stop the clearance before Valentine’s week starts on 7 February; those buyers are not looking for a bargain and your prices should be back to normal. The year-end checklist covers the rest of the January tidy-up.

The eight weeks, side by side

What not to discount

• Personalised and made-to-order items. The price is your labour. A photo mug at 20% off is you working for less in the busiest week of the year.
• Hampers already priced by size. A build-your-own hamper priced at “3 for ₹899” already carries a discount against the items alone. Do not put a coupon on top.
• Your best seller, 15 to 24 December. It sells at full price in that window. Discount the things around it instead.
• Anything to below landed cost. Even in a clearance. A product sold below what it cost you to deliver is a loss you paid courier charges to make.
• Everything at once. A store-wide 20% teaches buyers that your prices are soft. One clear offer at a time reads as a reason, not a habit.
• A coupon on top of Buy X Get Y, by accident. Coupons on SitesPlaced have a Sale items rule that decides how they treat products already discounted. Check it before you run both, so a product is not discounted twice.

Setting these up on SitesPlaced

Coupons with expiry, minimum order and a cap, sale prices on products, the free-delivery bar, bundles as products, categories, product badges, the announcement bar, pause ordering and the build-your-own hamper page are all on the free plan, which costs ₹0 with 0% commission and takes UPI, cards, cash on delivery and WhatsApp checkout. Buy X Get Y, the welcome popup that reveals a code to first-time visitors, and the WhatsApp chat bubble are part of Growth at ₹499 a month, or ₹4,990 once for a year with no autopay; the sales boosters page lists the rest.

Starter, at ₹199 a month or ₹199 once for 30 days, gives you your own domain, removes the badge, adds store analytics so you can see which offer actually moved orders, 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. 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. The season’s plan is on the Christmas and New Year page for sellers.

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