Christmas is the busiest pre-order window for most bakeries, and most of the problems are decided in early November, not on December 23. This is the checklist I'd go through for a small Shopify bakery. Most of it uses Shopify's own settings.
1. Pick your last order day and write it everywhere
Choose the last day you'll accept Christmas orders and the last pickup day. Put both in the product descriptions, the collection description and the confirmation email. Customers read product pages. They rarely open an FAQ.
2. Make one Christmas collection
Put every Christmas item in one collection with its own page and a plain URL like /collections/christmas. Link it from your homepage banner. If an item is only available on some days, say that in the first line of its description.
3. Turn on local pickup
Settings → Shipping and delivery → Local pickup. Add your pickup instructions there. They appear in the order confirmation, which saves you a lot of emails.
4. Collect a pickup date
Shopify doesn't have a pickup date field out of the box. The common options:
- a date picker app at cart (many have free plans; check what they charge before December)
- separate variants per pickup day ("Dec 23", "Dec 24"), which is crude but works with no app
- a required line item property
Whatever you choose, block the days you're closed and set a same-day cut-off.
5. Limit how many you can make
If you can bake 40 stollen a day, don't sell 60. With the variant-per-day approach you can set inventory per variant. With a date picker, check whether it supports daily order limits.
6. Test one order end to end
Place a test order, pick a date, check the confirmation email, then check where the date shows up in the Shopify admin. Note exactly where it's stored. You'll need that for step 7.
7. Plan production from the orders
Each evening you need totals per item for the next day. Export and pivot, or use an app. I built one for this, Tikkivo BakeList: it reads the date from the order (field, metafield, tag or a fallback rule) and gives you a printable bake sheet per day, with orders missing a date flagged. Free plan for 30 orders a month. Disclosure: I'm the developer. https://apps.shopify.com/tikkivo-bakelist
8. Decide what happens to late changes
Write down your rule for changes and cancellations ("up to 48 hours before pickup") and put it in the confirmation email. You'll get those messages anyway. Having the rule written down makes them quick to answer.
If you want a second pair of eyes on your Christmas setup, I do these as a small fixed-price job. Email hi@tikkivo.com.
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