Dhanteras is on Friday the 6th. Diwali is Sunday the 8th.
So if you are reading this on Monday, the useful part of your festive planning is over. Whatever campaign you were going to run is either live or it isn’t, and the buying mostly happens before the festival rather than on it, which means the window you have been preparing for has already opened.
What’s left is four days, and none of it is creative work.
The next four days decide whether demand that is already coming actually converts, and the single most valuable thing you can do with them is subtract. Every new thing you introduce between now and Sunday is a thing you will be debugging on the busiest day of your year, with half your team on leave.
Get your real cutoff date in writing, today
There is no national delivery cutoff for Diwali. It depends on your pin codes, your courier and your service level, which is why every number you have seen quoted is somebody’s average.
So ask yours directly, by email, today. What is the last pickup date for delivery before Dhanteras, by zone? Get the answer in writing, because you are going to publish it and you will want it from them rather than from a blog.
Amazon’s own shipping guidance for Indian sellers is honest about the shape of it: there is no single cutoff, and the illustrative version is two to three days ahead in cities with next-day coverage and five to seven days elsewhere to absorb festive-week congestion. Treat that as the shape, not as your date.
Then put your date on the product page, before checkout, not in a support reply afterwards. An order you accept on Friday that cannot arrive by Sunday is not a sale, it is a refund plus a bad review plus a parcel coming back to you.
And if you were planning to add a second courier for capacity, you have missed that window. Onboarding a courier during peak is one of the ways brands turn a good festive season into a bad one.
Freeze everything
This is the advice nobody gives and it is the most valuable thing on the list.
Between now and the 10th, do not launch: a new payment gateway, a new courier integration, a theme update, a page builder change, a redesigned checkout, a new discount engine, a new CRM, a new WhatsApp automation, or a restructure of your ad account.
Every one of those is a reasonable thing to do in January. All of them share a property that matters this week, which is that you cannot debug them at four times your normal volume with your developer unreachable and your patience gone. A checkout that breaks quietly on Saturday evening costs more than everything on your campaign calendar is worth.
The only changes worth making this week are ones that reduce surface area. Switching off a thing that is already broken counts. Adding anything does not.
Pre-write six messages before Thursday
Here is the concrete part, and it takes about ninety minutes.
At peak, your response time matters more than your wording, and you cannot write well with two hundred messages queued. So write these now, approve them now, and put them somewhere whoever is answering the phone can actually find them.
The out of stock message, with what you are offering instead. The delayed delivery message, which must contain a new date rather than an apology. The “where is my order” reply, with the tracking link and the honest range. The payment failed but money was debited message, which is the one that generates the angriest calls and the one nobody writes in advance. The sale is ending message. And the post-festival message, which I will come back to, because it is worth more than the other five together.
One timing point: if any of those go out as a WhatsApp template, the approval is not instant. That means submitting today, not on Saturday when you need it.
Decide your discount floor while you are calm
On Friday morning, if sales are behind plan, you are going to want to add 10%.
Write down today the floor you will not go below, and the date after which you stop discounting entirely. Then put both in a message to whoever can authorise a price change, so that Friday’s decision is a lookup rather than a judgement call made in a bad mood.
Two reasons this is worth doing in advance. A panic discount on the 6th teaches your list that waiting pays, and they will wait again in January. And the customers who bought at full price on the 3rd are the ones who find out, which costs you the goodwill of exactly the people who trusted you first.
The other half of the arithmetic: festive advertising is expensive. I went through why Indian CPMs rise through this window and the point here is that a discount and a CPM increase stack. If your margin is already thin, the festive version of your unit economics is a different business from your usual one, and it is worth knowing which one you are running before you commit the budget.
Sitting out the peak is a real option
Not every category gets a festive demand lift, and the ones that don’t are paying festive prices for ordinary demand.
Gifting, sweets, apparel, jewellery, consumer durables, anything bought as a present: compete now, obviously. The demand is genuinely there and absence is expensive.
Considered purchases, services, anything needing an appointment, an installation or a site visit, most B2B: your buyer is distracted and your cost to reach them is at its annual high. The fortnight after is frequently the better trade, and I made that case for a specific category when writing about fitness demand around festivals.
If you’re in the second group, the correct festive strategy is a small presence, no discounting, and a plan for the 12th.
The week after is the part nobody plans
Two things arrive together once the festival ends, and neither is on anybody’s calendar.
The returns wave, which is larger in this window than at any other point in the year and lands hardest on cash orders. I went through what that actually costs and why, so the only thing to add is that your post-festive cash position will look worse than your sales figures suggest, and you should plan your December stock order knowing that.
And the opportunity, which almost everybody wastes. The orders placed this week are the best customer list you will build all year, from people who bought at full attention and full price. Most brands never speak to them again until the next sale. One message on the 12th, written now while you have time to write it properly, is the highest-return item on this entire list.
Before lunch
Three things, this morning.
Email your courier and ask for the last pickup date for pre-Dhanteras delivery by zone, then put that date on your product pages.
Write a one-line freeze note to your team: nothing new goes live before the 10th, and here is the list of things that specifically means.
Then block ninety minutes tomorrow to write the six messages, and submit any WhatsApp templates today so they are approved before you need them.
If you’d like a second pair of eyes on whether your category should be competing this fortnight or the one after, drop me a line on email, WhatsApp, phone or LinkedIn and we can have a quick chat, and my notes on performance marketing cover the spend side of it. I’m taking on a small number of contracts at the moment, so I’ll tell you straight whether it’s something I could help with.