How much stock should a small seller plan for Diwali?

Nobody can tell you how many units you will sell this Diwali, and anyone who gives a confident number is guessing. What you can do is build an estimate from facts you already have: your own orders and the time it takes to restock. Here is a method.

Step one, read your own history

Open your order records and look at a normal stretch of weeks. For each product, note how many units went out per week. If this is your first festive season, use your best recent weeks as your base. You can export orders from the admin Orders screen as a workbook, as described in exporting store orders to a spreadsheet, and sum units by product.

If you have no history, start with a very small order, and treat the festive season as a learning exercise.

Step two, choose a lift you can defend

Festive weeks usually bring more orders than normal, but by how much is unknown. Rather than trusting a number from someone else, pick a cautious multiplier and a stretch one. For instance, plan a base case of one and a half times your normal weekly rate and a stretch case of double. These multipliers are placeholders to show the method, not predictions.

Step three, add lead time

Count backwards. Find out how long your supplier or your own making takes, add transit time to you, and add a buffer. That gives your latest safe reorder date. Anything you cannot restock in time needs to be ordered up front in the right quantity.

An illustrative example with invented numbers. Say you normally sell 10 units a week of a gift box. Your festive window runs six weeks. Base case: 15 per week for six weeks is 90 units. Stretch case: 20 per week gives 120. You already hold 25. So the base case needs 65 more and the stretch case needs 95 more. The difference is 30 units, which is the risk you are deciding on.

Step four, cap the downside

Order the base case, and keep the extra 30 as something you can reorder, if your supplier allows quick repeats. If not, order a little above the base case and accept some risk. The right amount is where a miss will not hurt your cash or leave you holding boxes that only suit one season.

Ask yourself what happens to leftovers. Can the product sell after the festival? A plain item can; a festival-printed one may not. Our broader guide how to plan festive stock without overbuying covers this in detail.

Step five, allocate by product

Do not spread the multiplier evenly. Your bestsellers deserve most of the extra stock, and slow items deserve none. Rank your products by how fast they move and give each its own number.

Keep checking as the season runs

Update your estimate weekly using real orders. If you are selling faster than your base case, place an early top-up. If slower, stop ordering. A weekly stock count keeps the numbers true.

Tell customers early

Stock planning ends with communication. Set an order cut-off and share it widely, using how to announce festive shipping cut-off dates.

Check the date of the festival on a calendar yourself, since dates shift each year, and work backwards from there.