Boxing Day sale on Shopify: switching your store over at midnight

Boxing Day sales start while most store owners are asleep. On the night of 25 December your store has to stop talking about Christmas delivery and start talking about the sale, ideally at midnight where your shoppers live. If the swap waits until you open your laptop, the first shoppers of the day land on a "last order date" message for a date that has passed.

This guide gives you an on-site plan for Boxing Day and the days after it: what to take down, what to put up, how to time both, and sample messages you can adapt. It suits stores selling into the UK, Canada, Australia and New Zealand.

Where the Christmas to Boxing Day switch goes wrong

Shoppers notice mistakes in the on-site handover.

• Stale Christmas messages. A shipping cutoff, a "order by" reminder or a gift guide that is still live on 26 December makes the whole store look unattended.
• A sale that starts late. Shoppers who check at 7 AM and see full prices may not come back after breakfast.
• The wrong midnight. If you sell from one country into another, the sale needs to start at midnight for the shopper, not for you.
• Two versions of the news. Editing a Christmas message into a sale message leaves shoppers who already saw it with no signal that something changed.

A Boxing Day timeline from Christmas Eve to New Year

Write the plan as start and end times before you build anything, in your shoppers' time zone.

1. Before Christmas. A teaser message in the feed: "Our Boxing Day sale starts 26 December at midnight." Link it to a page shoppers can bookmark.
2. 25 December, 11 PM. Christmas messages end: shipping cutoffs, gift guides and any "order by" reminders.
3. 26 December, midnight. The sale campaign starts, with its own feed message and a NotiPop on collection pages. The sale theme goes live.
4. Last day of the sale. A new "last day" message replaces the launch message.
5. End of the sale. Sale campaigns end, the everyday theme returns, and any returns or delivery update for the new year goes up.

Times in Atomato are on the hour, so plan in whole hours. For a fuller view of the season, see how to plan BFCM on-site messages.

Schedule the overnight swap

On Scale and Enterprise+, NotiFeed, NotiPop and NotiSell campaigns have a Schedule tab with a start date and time and an optional end, and so do NotiEmail campaigns on Enterprise+. Set your Christmas campaigns to end late on 25 December and your sale campaigns to start at midnight on the 26th.

One detail matters more than any other for Boxing Day: schedule times use the time zone of the computer you schedule from, not your store's time zone. If you live in one country and sell into another, convert the time before you save. A shop run from New York selling to the UK, for example, would set a UK midnight start as 7 PM on 25 December in the editor.

A schedule belongs to the whole campaign, not to each message. Put the launch message and the last day message in separate campaigns, so each one can start and end at its own time. Because a new message counts as unread, the bell's badge lights up again for the last day message, which an edited launch message would not do.

On Starter (Free), scheduling isn't available, and while one NotiFeed campaign is active, Atomato won't save another, even as a draft. The same goes for NotiPop. Run the swap by hand: on the morning of the 26th, pause the Christmas campaign, then build and save the sale one. See Schedule a campaign to start and end for every rule.

Change the store look with Theme Launcher

If your Boxing Day sale has its own homepage banners and colors, prepare a copy of your theme in Shopify and let Theme Launcher publish it at the start time. It can switch back to your everyday theme when the sale ends. Theme Launcher is on every plan. On Starter (Free), you can't save a switch while another is mid-event, so schedule this one before any Christmas switch starts.

Two checks before the night:

• Turn on the Atomato app embed in the sale theme as well. App embeds are saved per theme, and without it your bell and messages disappear when that theme goes live.
• Match the theme switch time to your campaign times, so the store look and the messages change together. Theme Launcher also uses the time zone of the device you schedule from.

After each switch, check Online Store > Themes in Shopify. If Shopify can't publish a theme, Atomato emails the recipients turned on under Settings > Email notifications. For a step by step walkthrough, read how to schedule a theme switch for a sale.

Sample messages for Boxing Day shoppers

Write for two visitors: bargain hunters and people with a new gift card to spend. Link every message to a product, collection or search page so a click has the longest window to count a later add to cart.

Before: "Order by 18 December for Christmas delivery." Still live on the 26th, linked to the home page.

After, launch message in the feed:

Boxing Day sale is on. Up to 40% off winter stock until 31 December. Shop the sale.

Gift card message in the feed:

Got a gift card for Christmas? It works on sale items too. Browse what's new.

NotiPop on collection pages, with a Page URL rule set to Contains /collections/:

Sale prices are already applied. No code needed.

Last day message, in its own campaign:

Last day of the Boxing Day sale. Prices go back up at midnight.

Replace the percentages, dates and wording with your real offer. Set up the discount in Shopify first, because Atomato doesn't create discount codes for these messages, and a NotiPop has no discount code setting. The gift card promotion ideas post has more messages for gift card holders.

Selling into several countries

Boxing Day is a shopping day in some of your markets and not others. A shopper in the United States doesn't need a "Boxing Day" message, while a shopper in Toronto does.

Atomato can't target by location. If each market has its own subfolder, such as /en-gb or /en-ca, a Page URL rule set to Contains /en-gb shows the message only on that market's pages. The rule checks the path, not the domain, so markets on separate domains can't be told apart this way. On Scale and Enterprise+, you can also translate each campaign into the languages your store sells in, so a French Canadian shopper reads the sale message in French. See Translate your campaigns.

Where markets are in different time zones, run one campaign per market with its own start time.

What this plan does not do

• Atomato doesn't show messages on checkout or the thank-you page, so put sale terms on the product and cart pages too.
• It doesn't send emails or texts. Your Boxing Day emails come from the email platform you already use, and the on-site messages work alongside them.
• Cart value rules count any gift cards in the cart, and they can't be left out. Keep that in mind if a sale message depends on a spend threshold.

Next step

Write your timeline this week. Set the Christmas end times and Boxing Day start times in one sitting, then check the Schedule column in Campaigns. When the sale is over, clear out its messages as described in retiring sale messages after Cyber Monday. Scheduling needs Scale or Enterprise+, and you can compare plans on the pricing page.

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