Holiday closure notice for your online store: dates, ship days and replies

If your team takes a break over the holidays, shoppers need three answers before they order: when you close, when their parcel will actually ship, and when someone will reply to them. A closure notice that answers all three saves you a pile of "where is my order" emails in January.

This guide shows what to put in a holiday closure notice, where on your Shopify store each part belongs, and how to set it to appear and disappear on the right days with Atomato. You will finish with a ready-to-copy plan for a store that closes from 24 December to 1 January.

Your store can stay open the whole time. The notice is about setting expectations, so shoppers keep buying with the right dates in mind.

What a holiday closure notice needs to say

Most closure notices fail because they say "happy holidays, we are taking a break" and stop there. A shopper reading it still does not know what happens to an order placed on 27 December. Cover these four points, in plain dates:

• The closed dates. "Our team is off from 24 December to 1 January." Use real dates, not "over the festive period".
• What still works. "You can still shop and check out as usual."
• When orders ship. "Orders placed while we are closed ship from 2 January."
• When you will reply. "Messages sent during the break get a reply by 5 January."

Keep the last order date for Christmas delivery as its own message. That is a different promise with a different deadline, and our guide to holiday shipping cutoff messages covers it.

Where shoppers should see each part

Each part of the notice matters most on a different page. The full notice belongs in your store's feed, which shoppers open from the bell, and the shorter lines belong next to the moment they answer.

• The whole notice, in the feed. A NotiFeed message sits behind the bell in your header, so shoppers can read the full dates whenever they choose. The bell's badge tells them there is something new.
• The reply time, on your contact page. This is where a shopper is about to write to you, so it is the right moment to say when they will hear back.
• The ship date, on the cart page. A short NotiPop on the cart tells the shopper, right before checkout, that the order ships from 2 January.

Targeting rules control the page part, and they work on every plan. Each message gets its own rules, so the contact page line can show only on the contact page while the main notice shows everywhere. The targeting rules help article lists every rule type.

A worked example: closed 24 December to 1 January

Here is the full setup for a store on the Scale plan, which allows several messages per campaign and scheduling.

Campaign 1, NotiFeed, two messages:

1. Title: "Our team is off 24 December to 1 January". Description: "You can still shop as usual. Orders placed while we are closed ship from 2 January. Thanks for your patience." No targeting, so it shows on every page.
2. Title: "Writing to us over the holidays?". Description: "We are away from 24 December to 1 January and will reply to every message by 5 January." Targeting: Page URL, Contains, /pages/contact. Contains also matches language folders such as /fr/pages/contact.

Check your contact page path first. Page URL looks at the path after your domain and ignores capital letters, so type the path, not the full address.

Campaign 2, NotiPop, one message:

• Title: "Ordering now? Your parcel ships from 2 January."
• Targeting: Page URL, Is equal to, /cart.
• Appear after: Delay, 2 seconds. Hide after: 8 seconds, the default.

On phones, a NotiPop shows across the bottom of the screen, so check on a phone that it reads well there. If your theme uses a slide-out cart instead of a cart page, replace the Page URL rule with a Cart items rule set to Is greater than 0. The NotiPop then appears as soon as the cart has an item, on any page, without the 2 second delay. With some themes, a cart change only counts from the next page load.

Before and after. Before: a single line in the announcement bar reading "Happy holidays from all of us". After: the dates and what still works in the feed, the reply time where shoppers write to you, and the ship date at the cart, each in one short sentence.

Set it to start and stop on its own

A closure notice that is still up on 3 January makes the whole store look unattended. On Scale and Enterprise+, give each campaign a start and an end on its Schedule tab, and it goes live and finishes without you logging in.

For the example above, a sensible plan is:

• Start both campaigns about a week before you close, so shoppers planning gift orders see the dates early.
• End them on the morning you reopen, 2 January.

Three details to know before you save:

• Times are in whole hours.
• Times use the time zone of the computer you schedule from, not your store's time zone. Convert them first if the two differ.
• A schedule belongs to the whole campaign, not to one message. Messages that need different dates go in separate campaigns.

The scheduling help article walks through each step.

On Starter (Free) there is no scheduling, and you get one active NotiFeed campaign and one active NotiPop campaign, each with one message. You can still run the main notice in the feed and the ship date on the cart. Pause both by hand when you reopen. If a Black Friday or Christmas message is still active in your one NotiFeed campaign, pause it before you start the closure notice.

Say you are back with a new message

When you reopen, it is tempting to edit the closure message to say "We are back". Shoppers who already saw the old message will not see the edit as new, because the bell's badge only counts messages a shopper has not yet seen in that browser. A new message counts again.

So publish a short new NotiFeed campaign instead, for example: "We are back. Orders placed over the break are shipping now, oldest first." On Scale and Enterprise+, give it its own start date of 2 January, since its dates differ from the closure campaign. On Starter (Free), end the closure campaign first, then publish the new one by hand. Our shipping delay message guide has wording for when the backlog takes longer than planned.

What this does not do

An on-site notice only reaches shoppers on your storefront. Be clear about the edges:

• Atomato does not show on Shopify checkout, the thank-you page or POS, and it does not send emails or texts to shoppers. Put the ship date in your order confirmation email in Shopify as well.
• It does not pause your store, change shipping rates or change the delivery dates your checkout shows. Those stay in your Shopify settings.
• Atomato has no location or country rule, so write dates that hold for everyone, or name the regions in the message.
• It does not reply to customers for you. The contact page message sets expectations, and your inbox still needs a plan.

Next step

Write down your closed dates, your first ship date and your reply-by date, then build the feed message first, since it carries the whole notice. Add the contact page and cart lines once it reads well, preview them on desktop and mobile, and set the end date before you save. For more message ideas to run through the season, see our on-site notification examples and the holiday planning page.

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