Around now, shops start making Christmas promises. A notice bar that says “Order by the last order date for Christmas delivery”. A gift guide email with a dozen products picked out. A “Gifts under the tree” category on the homepage. An ad for the one product you’re sure will fly.
Every one of those is a promise about stock, not just about the courier.
“Order in time and it’ll arrive for Christmas” only works if the thing is on the shelf when the order comes in. If WooCommerce says 8 and the shelf has 2, the delivery date doesn’t matter. The customer who orders the third one doesn’t get a parcel. They get an apology email, a refund, and a week less to find something else.
Most of the planning around Christmas delivery dates goes into the courier side: last posting dates, cut-off times, what the banner should say. That’s the right thing to plan. I’d just add one step before any of it goes public: count the products your promises point at.
Write down your promises first
Before anyone counts anything, list every place you’re about to promise something for Christmas:
- The last-order-date notice, on the site, in emails and on social.
- Your gift guide, whether it’s a page, an email or both.
- Homepage tiles and “top gifts” categories. If it’s on the front of the shop, people will order it.
- Anything you’re paying to advertise. Sending paid traffic to an empty shelf is the worst kind of promise.
- Personalised or made-to-order lines. These usually need an earlier cut-off, so check the materials, not just the finished stock.
Now pull out the products those promises name. That’s your count list.
It’s usually far shorter than your catalogue, and it’s not the same as your Black Friday list. A sale list is the stock you want to move. A gift guide is the stock you want people to rely on, often full-price giftable lines that nobody has looked at since September. If you’ve already counted your sale products, as I suggested in Count It Before You Discount It, this is the other half.
Count the list before it goes out, not after
The timing matters more than the count. Count the gift guide products in the days before the email is scheduled, not the week after.
If the count turns up a problem before the email goes, you swap a product out and nobody knows. Once it’s gone to your whole list, you can’t unsend it. You’re just waiting to see who orders the one you haven’t got.
In Inventory Check, I’d start a stock check and name it after the promise, something like “Gift guide 2026”. Then on your phone, open /inventory-check/ on your own site, search for each product by name or SKU, or tap Scan and use the camera on the barcode, and enter the quantity in front of you.
Two things help with a gift list in particular:
- Count the variations, not the parent. Gift guides love “the scarf, in four colours”. A customer doesn’t buy “the scarf”. They buy the green one. If the green one is the one that’s short, the parent total won’t tell you.
- You can see what you’ve already counted. Products already counted in this check show as Checked, so you won’t count the same gift set twice because it’s on two shelves.
If your stock lives in a garage or a unit with patchy signal, you can keep counting if the connection drops, and the counts sync when you’re back online.
Turn each difference into a decision about the promise
When you’ve finished counting, the review screen shows what WooCommerce expected, what you counted, and the difference. For a promise list, every difference is really a question about what you’re promising.
- The shelf has fewer than the website. Update the stock so WooCommerce stops selling what you haven’t got. Then decide if it still belongs in the gift guide. A product that sells out on day two leaves your most important email of the year pointing at an out-of-stock page.
- The shelf has none. Take it out of the guide. If you’re reordering, ask your supplier for a real delivery date and compare it with your last order date. If it won’t arrive in time to be sent, don’t promise Christmas delivery on it.
- The shelf has more than you thought. That’s your gift guide’s best friend. It’s stock you can safely put in front of people.
- A line needs a recheck. If an order comes in for a product after you counted it, Inventory Check flags it as a conflict rather than overwriting the newer stock figure. Go back and count it again.
None of this touches your live stock while you’re counting. Inventory Check doesn’t change WooCommerce until someone with the right role reviews the differences and confirms Update stock in the app. So you can count during the day while orders are still coming in. If you’ve got seasonal help doing the counting, give them the Counter role and keep the final say yourself. I explained how in Counter on the Floor, Supervisor at the Desk.
One WooCommerce setting to check while you’re there: make sure Manage stock is ticked on each of those products or variations, and that Allow backorders is set to “Do not allow”. Once the number is right, that’s what stops WooCommerce taking an order at zero.
Recount before the last order date
The gift guide count happens early. The second count is the one I’d do a few days before your last order date.
That’s the busiest stretch of the year, and the week a wrong number costs the most, because the customer has no time left to buy elsewhere. It doesn’t need to be a big count. Start a new check, call it “Last order date recount”, and only count:
- whatever has sold fastest since the gift guide went out
- anything that has come back as a return, in case it went back on the shelf but not into WooCommerce
- anything you’ve had a bad feeling about since the first count
That’s half an hour, not a stocktake. If you want the bigger picture, my pre-Christmas stocktake post covers counting your best sellers over a few evenings. This is the short, targeted check that sits on top of it.
Keep the record
When each check is done, the History screen in wp-admin keeps a record of what was counted and what changed, and you can download it as a CSV. Keep both files. Next year, when you’re picking products for the gift guide, you’ll know which ones ran short last time and when.
Wrap Up
A Christmas delivery date is really two promises. One is that the courier will get the parcel there in time. You can’t control that one. The other is that you’ve got the thing to send. That one you can check.
So before your last order dates and gift guide go out, list the products they promise, count those first, fix the numbers, and take out anything you can’t stand behind.
Inventory Check for WooCommerce is fully free. You’ll find setup notes and the full docs on the Inventory Check for WooCommerce page, and you can install it from the WordPress.org plugin directory.
Written by Connie, an AI, from Neil Matthews’ notes, archive, and direction. Neil directed and edited this piece. He did not write these words. Augmented publishing by Neil Matthews.