As the festive season sets the vibe, it’s time for all e-commerce brands to gear up for the biggest sales events of the year: Flipkart’s Big Billion Days starting September 22, Amazon’s Great Indian Festival from September 23, and Myntra’s Diwali Sales from October 22, 2025. With these mega-events already announced, the festive countdown has officially begun.
Shoppers, too, are in full swing; many have already started buying traditional outfits for garba night as Navratri approaches, and demand will only intensify with Dussehra, Durga Puja, and Diwali right around the corner.
The momentum is already building. Pre-festive sales during Rakhi and Independence Day have recorded a 15–20% spike in order volumes, signaling that brands must strengthen their backend operations now. In this blog, we’ll explore the top 10 backend operational strategies to power your e-commerce festive sales in 2025.
1. Analyze Previous Trends to Forecast and Strategize
Although the festive season is very unpredictable, analyzing past trends can give you a lot of hints. Here is what you need to know before preparing for the upcoming festive season.
a)Tier-wise demand breakdown
As of 2024, tier 2 and 3 cities drove the e-commerce momentum during the whole festive season, surpassing the demand from major cities like Delhi, Bangalore, Hyderabad, etc.. Here is the complete breakdown according to Unicommerce’s 2024 festive trend report.
- Tier 1 – 16%
- Tier 2- 21%
- Tier 3- 22%
b) Knowing Emerging & Top Categories
You can become a big player in the e-commerce space if you already know which products are going to sell more. As per the previous trend, fashion and cosmetics remain dominant during festive sales, with home decor, pharma, and travel accessories being the emerging categories. Here is the full breakup.
- Electronics & gaming – 100% growth
- Travel Accessories- 250%,
- Pharma- 100%
- Home decor – 200%
c) Understand COD & Prepaid Order Split
The festive season brings a flood of exciting deals, attracting both regular and first-time online shoppers. Since many prefer Cash on Delivery (COD) over prepaid options, orders become more prone to cancellation. On top of that, with heavy discounts and offers, shoppers often buy multiple products, keep the ones they like, and return the rest, further adding to the return volumes.
Glimpse from the previous year’s trend
- COD – 35%
- Prepaid – 10%
Understanding these data points can help you create your strategy outline, such as which category of products you need to focus on more and how you can reduce the bad impact from COD returns ( about which we’ll talk later).
2. Real-time Inventory Visibility to Keep Up with Fluctuations
The festive season can come with a lot of surprises. Let’s say you have 10 orders for one product on one day, and thousands of orders for another product on another day. How will you know which products you need to restock and which ones you do not? But with real-time tracking and inventory visibility, and your trend analysis knowledge, you can restock the must-have stocks in the warehouse. This will save you from-
- Stockouts and overselling
- Unnecessary panic situations due to stockouts
- Optimize multi-channel sales
- Help in agile decision-making, like instant stock allocation, price adjustment, and promotion strategy
3. Automate Order Flow
Festive times require a scalable system that can handle 10x order growth. That’s where you need a good order management system.
- Bulk order handling – process thousands of orders in one batch
- Order routing in case of inventory unavailability in the warehouse
- A centralized system to handle orders from various
4. Faster Packaging & Dispatch Operations
Every step has to be proactively taken during the festive season, and when it comes to packaging and dispatch, it has to be quick and accurate as well. However, doing it manually will only make the processes prone to error. Here are some of the ways to make the packing and dispatch process faster:
- Scan-based, quick, and accurate picking
- Bulk label generation
- Enable dispatch in a few clicks
5. Increase Profitability With RTO Prevention Suite
Proactively communicating with your customers during festive sales can instill confidence in them. Right from order confirmation to timely delivery notification via SMS, WhatsApp & Email.
All you need are:
- Confirm COD orders before shipping
- Categorize orders based on risk level with a fraud detection tool
- Use customer-centric delivery choices for rescheduling deliveries
6. Smart Bundling of Slow-Moving Stocks
The festive season is the best opportunity to pair slow-moving items with fast-moving ones in festive essential packs.
- Channel-specific bundling
- Personalized bundle offering
- Time-limited festive offers
7. Ensure Well-Integrated System to Handle Order Rush
Your Shopify store and marketplace platforms like Myntra, Flipkart, etc., and your ERP need to be integrated to let seamless data flow. This way, you don’t need to track order status on different selling channels, and it also eases your overall inventory planning.
- The consolidated view allows channel-wise inventory allocation
- Decide buffer stock level for each selling channel
8. Scan-Based Post-Festive Returns Management
Return rate in e-commerce revolves around 15-20%, and during the festive season, this rate may increase further. The issue arises when returned products arrive at the warehouse. Without an automated system, it is challenging to identify returned products and place them back in the system.
With automated systems, you can escape the hurdles of return management.
- Identify the product by simply scanning
- Extract complete lifecycle information of the returned product
- Identify fake returned products
9. Prepare Well to Manage COD orders
If you don’t want to receive COD orders, choose Amazon self-ship, which has that option, but if you are selling on multiple marketplaces, avoiding COD orders is inevitable; however, there are some tips to deal with COD orders from other platforms.
- Try Shopify robo calls to confirm orders
- Use automated software to confirm orders via SMS
- Activate Shipway’s instant address verification.
10. Optimize Warehouse Space
The best way to maintain efficiency during the festive season is to optimize warehouse space.
Here are some tips:
- Use your small warehouses for packaging and send them to a dedicated (large)warehouse only for the festive season use.
- Keep bundles and high-demand products near the packing station
- Handheld scanning device or mobile scan for quick and accurate picking
Use Unicommerce’s Newest Capabilities to Handle Festive Season Rush
Unicommerce is India’s largest e-commerce enablement SaaS platform, offering an end-to-end solution under one umbrella for all your e-commerce business. It comes pre-integrated with several marketplaces like Flipkart, Myntra, Amazon, Nykaa, Meesho, etc., thus, onboarding on these platforms is relatively easy, and you get a centralized platform to track inventory, orders, and sales on each marketplace.
Here are some of the newest capabilities recently added to make e-commerce selling seamless, whether it is a normal day of selling or a festive season rush:
Process Thousands of Orders in One Go with Quick Dispatch (Blinkmode)
You can handle over 2,000+ shipments in just a few clicks with Quick Packing and Bulk Label Printing, making order fulfillment faster than ever. Generate invoices, labels, and dispatch orders instantly, without spending hours on repetitive steps.
With Quick Dispatch, you no longer need to create, add, and close manifests before shipping. Instead, shipments can be dispatched directly, helping you save valuable time and effort, perfect for high-volume or festive season operations.
To further boost accuracy, you can visually match SKUs with marketplace images during linking, ensuring products are identified and dispatched correctly every time.
1. AI-Based Courier Allocation (Shipsense)
To deliver products efficiently, you can’t rely on just one courier partner. It’s important to choose partners based on their capabilities, whether it’s the type of product, delivery distance, or accessibility of the location. However, managing this manually can be time-consuming. With AI-powered allocation, the system can automatically assign the most suitable courier partner, ensuring faster and more reliable deliveries.
2. Identify Every Product With a Unique Serialized Number
Festive seasons often bring chaos to warehouse operations. Inventory scattered across shelves can easily result in wrong picking and incorrect deliveries. But with barcode-based product scanning, this risk is eliminated.
With a single scan, you can access the entire lifecycle of the product, where it’s stored, when it arrived, when it was ordered, and when it was returned. This not only helps prevent fake returns but also makes handling warranty claims easier, as expiry date and other critical details are instantly available.
3. Easy Reconciliation Post Festive Season
If you are selling on multiple marketplaces during the festive season, calculating your actual profit can quickly become messy. Each marketplace follows different fee structures, commission models, and penalty policies. By the end of the sales cycle, you may be left wondering: How much did I really earn? Were there any wrongful penalties applied? How much do I still need to reconcile and claim back?
This is where reconciliation becomes critical. Without a proper system in place, you risk revenue leakage due to untracked commissions, shipping overcharges, or missing settlements. Unireco uses a sophisticated algorithm to automatically match orders, payments, and returns across multiple marketplaces, giving businesses a real-time view of their reconciliation status. This allows them to quickly spot and resolve discrepancies, ensuring accuracy and preventing revenue leakage.
Final Say
With inventory tracking, quick dispatch, COD management, and smooth returns, brands can turn festive demand into lasting growth. And with Unicommerce’s latest capabilities, handling the rush becomes easier, faster, and more reliable.
Get your operations festive-ready today. Book a demo with Unicommerce and stay ahead this festive season!
FAQs
Q1. Why is it important to strengthen backend operations before festive e-commerce sales?
It is important to strengthen backend operations because festive sales often bring 8–10x higher order volumes. Without proper preparation, brands risk stockouts, delayed deliveries, and increased return-to-origin rates. By streamlining operations early, you can handle the festive rush smoothly and deliver a better customer experience.
Q2. How can real-time inventory visibility help during festive sales?
Real-time inventory visibility helps you stay in control when demand fluctuates. It allows you to track stock across all channels, prevent overselling, and quickly restock fast-moving items. With accurate insights, you can make agile decisions on stock allocation, pricing, and promotions.
Q3. What strategies can reduce COD-related returns during the festive rush?
You can reduce COD-related returns by confirming orders through automated calls or SMS, verifying addresses instantly, and using fraud detection tools to flag risky orders. It is also effective to provide customers with flexible delivery rescheduling options to minimize cancellations and failed deliveries.
Q4. How should brands manage the surge in returns post-festive season?
Brands can manage the surge in returns by using scan-based returns management. By simply scanning the product, you can access its complete lifecycle, restock genuine returns faster, and identify fake or fraudulent returns. This helps save time, reduce losses, and improve warehouse efficiency.
Q5. What role do platforms like Unicommerce play in festive readiness?
Platforms like Unicommerce play a critical role in festive readiness by automating key backend processes. It enables bulk order processing, AI-powered courier allocation, barcode-based SKU tracking, and easy reconciliation. This ensures you can process thousands of orders, ship faster, and prevent revenue leakage during peak season.