A year-end checklist for a small online store: 12 things to do before January gets busy

TL;DR

• • Stock: sale price, a Clearance category, a hard end on 26 January, then Archive.
• • Prices and policies: re-cost every product; rewrite returns and delivery times for the new year.
• • Reviews: ask this year’s buyers between 27 and 31 December, one message each.
• • Orders and accounts: no spreadsheet export exists; use the Orders tab, invoices, your gateway dashboard and bank statement. Confirm GST with a CA.
• • January: take Christmas off the store on 26 December; set New Year offers with an expiry; plan for 26 January and 7–14 February.

The checklist at a glance

1. Clear slow stock

Anything Christmas-specific still on the shelf on 26 December is worth more as cash than as stock you store until next year. Open each product, set a sale price (the original shows struck through), and put them all in a Clearance category under Settings → Categories so they share one page you can link from Instagram. Give the sale a hard end date and say it everywhere: Republic Day, Tuesday 26 January 2027, is a natural one.

Whatever is left after that, Archive. On SitesPlaced, Archive takes a product off the store without deleting it; archived products are hidden from your list by default and Restore to store brings one back in November with its photos and description intact. Do not delete a product you might sell again. The full set of January offers, and what not to discount, is in Christmas and New Year sale ideas.

2. Update prices

Costs moved this year: your supplier’s, the courier’s, the packaging. Prices set in March are probably wrong in December. For each product you will keep selling, work out the landed cost again (product, packaging, courier, payment charge) and check that the price still leaves what you need. The product pricing calculator and the profit margin calculator make it a ten-minute job per product. If you raise a price, do it on 1 January, when buyers expect it, and do not announce it.

3. Update policies

Read your returns, delivery and cancellation policies as a stranger would. Are the delivery times still true? Did you quietly stop accepting returns on personalised items but never write it down? Does the page mention a festival that has passed? On SitesPlaced, policies live under Settings → Pages & policies, and the return policy generator drafts a plain-English one you can edit. Add your holiday closure dates for the first week of January if you are taking time off. How to make customers trust your store explains why a clear policy page sells.

4. Collect reviews

Your December buyers are the best review source you will have all year, and the window is short. Between 27 and 31 December, message each one by name, mention what they bought, and ask for one honest line. Only ask people who ordered. On SitesPlaced, product reviews with your approval and Google star ratings are part of the Growth plan; the review appears on the product page once you approve it. On the free plan, ask for a WhatsApp or Instagram message and, with permission, quote it on your about page. How to collect product reviews has the messages and the timing.

5. Go through the year’s orders

Be honest about the tools here. SitesPlaced does not have a one-click export of orders to a spreadsheet. What you have is the Orders tab, with status tabs (Pending, Confirmed, Shipped, Out for Delivery, Completed, Cancelled) and a search box that finds orders by name, number or product; a PDF invoice on every order; and the Home tab with four numbers: today’s orders, orders needing action, revenue for the last 30 days, and all-time totals. On Starter and up, store analytics add visits, where they came from, top products, locations and devices.

So the year-end review is a notebook job, and it is worth doing. One quiet evening: write down, month by month, how many orders you had and what sold most. Use the Completed and Cancelled tabs to see how many orders failed and why. Count the COD orders that came back; how to reduce RTO and fake COD orders tells you what to do if the number hurts. Note the ten customers who ordered more than once; they are your January list.

For the money, go to the source: your payment gateway’s dashboard (Razorpay, PhonePe or Cashfree) shows settlements by date, and your bank statement shows what actually arrived, including UPI paid directly to you. Those two, not the store, are the records your CA will ask for.

6. Accounts and GST hygiene, in general terms

This is not tax advice; it is a list of what to have ready so that your CA’s advice is quick. Whether you need GST registration, and what and when you must file, depends on your turnover and what you sell, and the rules change. Confirm with a CA. Before you meet them:

• Every order has an invoice. On SitesPlaced, every order can be downloaded as a PDF invoice from the Orders tab; check that your store details under Settings → Payments & invoices carry your business name, address and GSTIN if you have one.
• Sales match the bank. Add up what the gateway settled and what came by UPI or cash, and compare it with what the store says you sold. Differences are usually refunds, COD returns or gateway charges; note each one.
• Keep the cost bills. Courier invoices from Shiprocket or Shipmozo, packaging, raw material, the domain, any ads. A folder on your phone is enough.
• Note refunds and cancellations with the order number, so no sale is counted that did not happen.
• Udyam. If you have not registered as an MSME, it is free and takes an evening; our plain-English guide walks through it. It is not a licence to sell, but it helps with bank accounts and some schemes.

7. Archive finished orders

Once you have been through the year, Archive every completed and cancelled order so the live list in January shows only what needs action. On SitesPlaced, Archive moves an order to the Archived Orders list, where it stays with its invoice and can be restored at any time. Do not use Delete for this; Delete asks “Delete forever?” and means it. Archive the test orders you placed on your own store too, so they stop appearing in your counts.

8. Check store details and holiday hours

Open Settings → Store details and read it: store name, the WhatsApp number buyers reach you on, your address. Numbers change and nobody notices until a buyer messages the old one. If you are taking the first week of January off, say so in the announcement bar (“Orders placed 1 to 3 January ship on Monday 4 January”), or tick Pause ordering under Settings → Checkout with your own message so that shoppers can browse but nobody expects a parcel you are not packing. If the store will be shut for longer, Close the store shows an opening-soon page instead.

9. Take Christmas off the store

On 26 December, the store should stop saying Merry Christmas. Change the announcement bar lines, swap any Christmas home-page section or photo for a New Year or winter one, untick the Christmas category on products that will carry on selling, and put the rest in Clearance (step 1). A store that still says “order by 18 December” on 2 January tells every visitor that nobody is home.

10. Plan January and February

Open a calendar and mark the dates that matter for your products:

• Monday 4 January: the first working day. Offices and schools restart; planners, lunch boxes and desk gifts sell.
• Tuesday 26 January, Republic Day: a holiday and the natural end of the clearance.
• 7 to 14 February, Valentine’s week: gifts, personalised items, hampers for two, cakes. List them by the end of January.
• Wedding season, roughly November to February: favours, return gifts, ethnic wear, jewellery. Dates vary by family, so ask the customer rather than assume.

If you want a fresh product line for the new year, New Year business ideas from home lists twelve with what each needs.

11. Set the New Year offers

Two offers are enough. A New Year code with a minimum order and an expiry (for example 15% off above ₹1,499, capped, ending Sunday 3 January), sent only to people who chose to hear from you, and the clearance from step 1. On SitesPlaced, coupons are under Settings → Discounts with an Expires date, a Minimum order value and a Max discount cap; set a Free delivery above amount under Settings → Shipping and the cart shows a bar nudging buyers towards it. Both are free. Copy-ready messages for the code are in Christmas and New Year WhatsApp messages.

12. Back up and tidy

• Download your subscribers. If you collect emails on your store, the Subscribers tab lets you download the list as a CSV file. Keep a copy; it is your list, and January is when you will use it.
• Check your storage. The free plan includes 500 MB of photos. Remove the Christmas photos you will not reuse and the duplicates from the rush, so you are not out of space in February.
• Domain renewal. If you connected your own domain, check when it renews with the company you bought it from and that the card on file still works. A lapsed domain takes your store offline on the day it expires.
• Passwords and access. If someone helped you in December, change the passwords they used and remove access you no longer need.
• Write down what you learned. One page: what sold, what did not, what broke in transit, which courier was late, what you would do differently in November 2027. You will not remember it otherwise.

Where this runs on SitesPlaced

Everything above except reviews and analytics is on the free plan: ₹0, 0% commission, unlimited products and orders, UPI and cards through your own gateway account, cash on delivery, WhatsApp checkout, coupons with an expiry, the free-delivery bar, categories, product and order archiving, PDF invoices, the announcement bar, pause ordering, policies pages and the subscriber list. If you are opening a store for the first time to start the year cleanly, the online store launch checklist is the companion to this one.

Starter, at ₹199 a month or ₹199 once for 30 days with no autopay (₹1,990 once for a year), adds your own domain, removes the badge, gives you the store analytics that make step 5 easier, 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 product reviews with Google star ratings, Buy X Get Y and the other sales boosters. 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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