On December 23, most small online stores do the same three things. They pause the ads, because the shipping cutoff has passed and nothing will arrive by Christmas anyway. They let the team go home. And they send a cheerful "see you in the new year" email that quietly announces the store is closed for business until January 4.
Then December 26 arrives, and so do the customers.
Not the frantic gift buyers from three weeks ago. A different crowd, with different money. Someone holding a $50 card with your store's name on it. Someone who just returned the sweater their aunt picked and has a refund landing this week. Someone who spent a month buying for everyone else and is finally shopping for the one person they skipped. They are ready to spend, and in a lot of inboxes, your store is not there.
This is the case for running an after-Christmas sale, and the plan for doing it without working through the holidays. Most of it is decided before you leave, which is why it belongs on your calendar now, not on December 26.
The Week After Christmas Is When Shoppers Finally Buy for Themselves
The stretch from December 26 to the first weekend of January is sometimes called the fifth quarter. The nickname oversells it a little, but the money behind it is real, and it comes from three places.
Returns. The National Retail Federation and Happy Returns estimated that 17% of holiday sales would be returned, and that 82% of shoppers return unwanted gifts within a month of receiving them. NRF also notes that the vast majority of holiday returns happen in January, and that many shoppers use a return as a reason to make another purchase. Adobe's data on the 2025 season found that one in every seven online returns of the season happened in the six days from December 26 to December 31. That is a lot of refunds and store credit hitting accounts in a single week.
Gift cards. Gift cards are the gift people plan to give more than almost anything else. Numerator's 2025 holiday research found that 72% of people celebrating Christmas planned to give one. Every one of those cards is spending power that can only go to one place, and much of it gets used, or forgotten, in the weeks right after the holiday.
Buying for yourself. After a month of shopping for other people, the shopping turns inward. The wish list a person did not get, the thing they almost bought in November, the upgrade they talked themselves out of. The mood is different, too: less rushed, less anxious, more "I earned this."
Look at who holds that money. The person with your gift card was sent to you by someone who already likes your store. The person with a return credit has already bought from you. The one shopping for themselves has very likely been on your email list for months. This is not a week for finding strangers. It is a week for showing up for the people who already know you.
Cheap Ads After Christmas Are Only a Bargain If People Still Buy
The most common pitch for selling after Christmas is that ads get cheap once the big retailers stop spending. That is true. It is also only half of the story, and the half you need is the other one.
Start with what is true. Biddyco, an agency that pulled data from large US Meta ad accounts spending about $6.9 million a month, compared every week of last season to the same accounts' October numbers. For consumer brands, the cost to show ads (CPM) was 8% below October in the week of December 22 and 24% below it in the week of December 29. More useful still, the cost to get a purchase was 26% and 24% below October in those two weeks. That was a better cost per purchase than Black Friday week itself, which came in 20% below October. The worst week of the season, by contrast, was December 8 to 14, when ad costs stayed high but shoppers had already bought, and cost per purchase ran 39% above October.
Now the other half. Meta's own holiday benchmarks, built from every purchase-optimized campaign on its platforms from October 2025 to mid-January, found that in Western European markets, ad costs fell 15% to 30% in mid to late December, and conversion rates fell right along with them. Meta's own words: lower costs "can look like opportunity, but only if shoppers are still converting. In these markets, they weren't." Meta also saw cost per result for 18 to 24 year-olds rise about 50% during Christmas week, while older shoppers held steadier.
Both sets of numbers can be right at once. Different markets, different audiences, different stores. What they agree on is the lesson: a cheap impression is not a cheap customer. The only number that tells you whether the week is working is what each sale costs you, measured against what you can afford to pay for one. If you have not worked that out yet, we walked through it in Your Ads Report a 3x Return. At a 30% Margin, Every One of Those Orders Lost Money.
For a small store, that points to a simple setup. Do not shut your ads off on the 24th by reflex. Keep them running to the people most likely to buy: past customers, recent site visitors, your email list uploaded as an audience. Look at cost per purchase every day of the week, not just CPM, and pull back the moment it climbs above your break-even. If you have spare budget and want to test cold prospecting while auctions are quiet, that is a reasonable bet. Just make it a small, deliberate test you will read on January 4, not the whole holiday budget left running unwatched. We covered why Meta prices swing so hard through the season in Meta Ads Get More Expensive in Q4. Plan For It Now.
A Card Refund Walks Out the Door. Store Credit Stays and Shops.
Here is a lever most owners never touch, because it lives in the returns settings instead of the marketing calendar.
When a customer returns a gift, the refund can go back to the original card or become store credit. A refund to a card is money that has left your business. It may come back, but it now competes with every other store in that person's life. Store credit stays. It sits in their account with your name on it, and the only thing it can buy is something you sell.
If you are on Shopify, the tools are already there:
- Refund to store credit. When you process a return, Shopify lets you refund to the original payment method, to store credit, or split it between the two.
- A segment of everyone holding credit. You can build a customer segment based on store credit balance and upcoming expiration dates. That segment is the audience for one of the most useful emails you will send all week.
- Expiration is your call, one credit at a time. Shopify has no store-wide default expiry for store credit. You choose an expiration date, or none, each time you issue it, and local law decides what you are allowed to set. Ask whoever does your books before you pick a date.
- Check two small catches. Customers can only spend store credit when they are signed in through Shopify's current customer accounts or Shop Pay, so test that it shows up at your checkout before the 26th. And for stores created on or after May 12, 2025, Shopify charges third-party transaction fees on the part of an order paid with store credit. Check your rate so the fee does not surprise you.
You cannot force anyone to take credit instead of cash, and you should not try. What you can do is make credit the easy, attractive choice. One way is to make store credit the first option in your return flow and add a small bonus for choosing it, such as $5 extra on a $50 return. That bonus costs you less than a lost customer, and it turns a return into a reason to come back the same week.
Gift cards work the same way. The person holding one already chose you, through someone else. We wrote a whole piece on what to do when a gift card recipient arrives, so we will not repeat it here. The point for this week is simpler: those balances are live, and a short reminder that they exist is one of the highest-value messages you can send.
Your Black Friday Offer Works Again at a Smaller Discount. Say Why It's Back.
You do not need a brand new campaign for the week after Christmas. The best offer to run is usually one you already built and tested: your Black Friday promotion, brought back.
There are two rules for doing that well.
Make it smaller, never bigger. If you ran 30% off on Black Friday, run something like 20% now. If you ran 20%, try 15% or a gift with purchase. The people shopping this week are not hunting the deepest deal of the year. They are holding money that is already set aside for spending, and they need a reason to spend it with you, not a markdown deep enough to trigger a bargain hunt. Going deeper than Black Friday does the opposite of what you want. It tells every customer who bought in November that they overpaid, and it teaches everyone to wait for the sale after the sale.
Give it a real reason to exist. A promotion that reappears with no explanation reads as a store that cannot stop discounting. A promotion with a reason reads as a gift. "You asked, so it's back for five days." "The holiday price stays on through December 30." "For everyone who spent December shopping for other people." Be honest about the reason. Shoppers can tell fake urgency from the real thing, and a countdown that resets is a lie customers catch, as we covered in Your Black Friday Sale Can Look Like a Clearance Bin or Like Your Brand.
And do not resend the Black Friday email. Same offer, new framing. In November the message was "buy before it's gone." In late December it is closer to "the rush is over, and this one is for you." Shorter copy, warmer tone, fewer exclamation points.
Not every store needs a discount at all this week. If your margins are thin, or you would rather not train customers to wait for a sale, three angles carry the week on their own: the gift card or credit balance they already hold, new arrivals framed as something for yourself, and the new year itself (a fresh routine, a refreshed room, a goal that starts Monday). We have written about building an offer that does not lean on a percentage, and this is a good week to use one.
Five Emails and Two Texts, Scheduled Before the Holidays, Run the Whole Week
The whole week runs on a short, planned sequence. The point is that you write and schedule all of it in the days before December 20, so the only work left during the holidays is a ten-minute check each morning.
Here is a simple version for this year's calendar, with the encore offer running from Saturday, December 26 through Wednesday, December 30:
- Saturday, December 26, email. The offer is back. Lead with the reason, then the products.
- Sunday, December 27, email and text, to balance holders only. "You have $X waiting." Send it to the store credit segment and to anyone who bought a gift card from you in December. This is the one message where a text earns its cost.
- Tuesday, December 29, email. Something for yourself: new arrivals or best sellers, with the offer as a footnote, not the headline.
- Wednesday, December 30, email and text. Last day. Clear, short, honest.
- Friday, January 1, email. No discount. A thank you, a look at what is coming this year, and a reason to come back in January at full price.
Three settings make this work instead of annoying people:
- Remove anyone who just bought. Most email tools let you exclude people who placed an order in the last day or two. Someone who bought on the 26th should not get "last chance" on the 30th.
- Keep texts for the urgency moments. Two texts in a week is plenty. Every text costs you money and a little goodwill, which is why we argued in Email Is Free to Send. Every Text You Send Costs You Something. that each one has to earn its place.
- Leave your automated emails on. Abandoned cart, browse abandonment, welcome and post-purchase emails should all be running and up to date. If you paused any of them for Black Friday, turn them back on before you leave. They do their best work in exactly this kind of week, when people are browsing on their phones between visits with family.
Then the daily check: revenue by day, cost per purchase on any ads still running, and whether anything has sold out. If a featured product runs out, swap it in the next scheduled email or point that email at the gift card instead. That is the whole job.
The Shopper Who Buys for Themselves on December 27 Is Your Best Bet for a Second Order
There is a quiet difference between the order you got on Black Friday and the one you get on December 27.
The Black Friday order often came from someone who was hunting the lowest price that weekend. Some of those customers will come back. Many will wait for next November. The December 27 order came from someone spending money that was already set aside, at a smaller discount, on something they picked for themselves. That person chose your store when the pressure was off. They tend to be a better bet for a second order, and the second order is where an online store actually makes its money, as we laid out in Your First Sale Barely Breaks Even. The Second One Is the Profit.
So the follow-up has to be ready before the week starts. A post-purchase email that thanks them, shows them how to get the most from what they bought, and gives them one reason to come back in February. For a gift card recipient who has never bought from you, the first email should introduce your store the way the gift giver never did. Write these in mid-December, while you still have the time to make them good. If you only run one automated email today, start with the five every store should be sending.
A Sold-Out Store Can't Run an After-Christmas Sale. It Can Still Send One Email.
None of this means every store should run a sale the week after Christmas. Skip it if:
- You are out of stock on the products people actually want. A sale on whatever is left trains customers to think of your store as a clearance rack.
- You sell gift-only products, like ornaments, holiday decor or gift wrap, where the demand ends on December 25. A clearance sale may make sense for leftover stock, but it is a different plan with a different goal.
- Nobody can answer customers that week. A sale brings questions, exchanges and delivery issues. If no one can respond for a week, the goodwill you lose can cost more than the sales you gain.
Even then, do not disappear entirely. Send one email between Christmas and New Year: a thank you for the year, a reminder of any gift card or credit balance they hold, and a note about what is coming in January. Keep your automated emails running. That costs nothing and keeps your store in the inbox during the one week most of your competitors have left it empty.
If you have been following our holiday planning, this is the week we mentioned at the end of Black Friday Is Won in September, Not November: the stretch where gift card balances are live, returns are flowing and most small stores have already switched off. It does not take much to be the store that is still open.
We plan weeks like this with online stores every season, and if you would rather hand it to someone, that is what we are here for. If you would rather run it yourself, block an hour before December 20, write the five emails and the two texts, and schedule them. The customers will show up either way. The only question is whether you will.
