Your Christmas Shopping Deadline May Be Sooner Than You Think

Amazon Prime Day is usually in July, but due to the pandemic, the company moved its two-day event to October 13 and 14.

How big is Amazon Prime Day? Last year's two days of sales surpassed both Black Friday and Cyber Monday combined, so this is a pretty big deal.

It's kind of early for Christmas shopping, though, right?

Wrong!

If you are one of those people that wait until the last minute to do your Christmas shopping, this might be the year to consider an early start. A number of online retailers are piggybacking off Amazon Prime Day to try to bait customers into spending their holiday shopping dollars earlier than normal. It is especially important to the retailers because they know that if consumers wait too long, they are unlikely to be able to fulfill their orders.

According to Janine Somers, Vice President of Marketing and Director to Consumer Sales for Stonewall Kitchen, the problem is two-fold.

First of all, while business in 2020 has been anything but usual, there are a number of retail items that have seen a major boom in demand.

"Everyone remembers when you couldn't get toilet paper, you couldn't get paper towels and you couldn't get wipes," Somers said. "The reason for that is because the uptick of volume literally surpassed the supply chain for tons of brands."

Somers pointed out that even with Amazon, Prime members went from an expectation of a two-day delivery to a two-week delivery window to a "we'll see when we can even get it to you" window. The bottom line is that online sales have exploded.

Somers said that shoppers should watch for retailers to put their products on sale early (as early as today, in fact) to avoid these supply chain issues.

"If you decide you want to shop in December, we might be out of inventory," Somers said, "And that's true for a lot of brands."

The second part of the problem is that UPS, FedEx and USPS are simply not going to be able to keep up with the volume the closer we get to Christmas Day.

Somers encouraged getting your orders in before Black Friday. You may have wiggle room when it comes to the big box stores like Target and Walmart, but the smaller, specialty brands could dry up before Thanksgiving.