Grow revenue

1. Get delivery dates right, everywhere shoppers look. 

Show estimated delivery dates on the product page, in cart, and at checkout, add urgency messaging ("order by Dec 12 to get it by the 24th"), and audit your cutoff times with buffer days built in. In Narvar's research, 70% of consumers say an accurate delivery date is very important to a holiday purchase and 49% say a reliable date makes them more likely to buy. Getting it right drives up to 5% more site conversions and about 4% more merchandise revenue per visit. 

70% of consumers say an accurate delivery date is very important to a holiday purchase. Show it clearly and you win the sale before the cart.

2. Put shipping protection where the doubt lives. 

Porch piracy worsens every season: 73% of consumers have been a victim, 62% say the threat stops them from shopping online, and it cost U.S. consumers roughly $15B in 2025. Offer shipping protection at cart, checkout, and the thank-you page. Shoppers get peace of mind, you earn about a 1.5% lift in net margin, and claims come off your team's plate.

3. Treat your tracking page like your most engaged storefront. 

While a shopper waits for a package, they are paying close attention, and that attention converts. 96% of consumers are more likely to buy when a brand personalizes based on their history and retailers see a 50%-plus lift in click-through when they run timely campaigns inside the tracking experience. What’s more, segmentation unlocks a 20%-or-more lift in engagement. It is also where you grow your marketing base: 51% of shoppers now prefer order updates by SMS and 86% want communications tailored to them.

4. Make gift tracking effortless for the recipient. 

Gifting peaks now, and so does timing anxiety. 42% of consumers plan to shop online specifically to ship to friends and family, and 70% of gift-givers will pick an on-time gift over a better one that arrives late. And there’s no need to ruin the surprise: Gift tracking in Narvar Track, for example, hides the item details while still telling the recipient what is coming and when. 

An accurate EDD drives up to 5% more site conversions and about 4% more merchandise revenue.

Operate efficiently

5. Answer "where is my order" before it is asked. 

A large share of contact volume disappears with proactive touchpoints: an On Its Way at the first carrier scan, a Fulfillment Delay flag when things back up, an Out for Delivery, and a Missed Attempt so a hiccup does not become a ticket. For split shipments, add a conditional banner and multi-shipment visibility in both email and on the Track page, so a shopper who sees one of three boxes arrive does not open a case.

6. Deflect WISMO with self-service, before the spike. 

Surface order status inside My Account and order-history pages, add chatbot and IVR self-service, and put real-time order status in your agents' view. Narvar gives our customers the ability to do that with Connect and Care integrations for Zendesk, Salesforce Service Cloud, Kustomer, or Gladly. Automated notifications and self-service drive a 60% decrease in WISMO queries, chat and IVR deflect about 25% of calls, and together they cut call-center costs by up to 50%.

7. Rethink where your returns go. 

Reverse logistics is one of your biggest efficiency levers. Offer in-store, boxless, and label-free methods, knowing printerless QR options are seeing 35 to 60% adoption, and use consolidated returns to cut reverse-logistics costs by up to 40%. Our survey showed 78% of consumers would happily return items to a convenient attended location, and smart routing can deliver up to 89% in transportation savings. In fact, Narvar's intelligent returns routing helped one enterprise retailer save 545 million miles.

Consolidated returns can cut reverse-logistics costs by up to 40%.

Protect and retain margin

8. Make refunds instant and exchanges easy. 

Refunds do double duty this season. 89% of shoppers say instant refunds would increase their likelihood of shopping with a retailer, while 76% say a negative return makes them less likely to buy again. Let shoppers choose their refund type (gift card or original payment) and add incentives like instant store credit that keep the money in your ecosystem. Then offer even and uneven exchanges so a shopper can swap into the right item and pay any difference. Done well, returns retain up to 60% of that revenue instead of losing it.

9. Defend margin against delivery-claim and return fraud. 

Fraud rises with volume. 31% of fraudsters admit to lying about non-delivery to get a refund, and 37% of shoppers admit to some form of return fraud. Require Visual Proof of Delivery on qualifying orders, enable delivery instructions and signature pre-authorization, and support package redirections to handle exceptions proactively. The payoff is up to a 25% reduction in delivery-claim payouts.

10. Set your return rules now. 

So much of holiday success is about starting early. Configure your holiday return rules ahead of time, tailor windows and enforcement logic by segment, and enable bundled returns so BOGOs, gifts-with-purchase, and multi-item orders have clear logic.

The bottom line

Peak rewards the retailers who prepare. Every move above does two jobs at once: it makes the season calmer for your team and more trustworthy for your shopper, which is exactly where the readiness gap closes. Retail hospitality, not back-end logistics, is what turns a high-volume season into repeat shoppers. Start with the three or four plays that map to your biggest peak headache, and build from there.