207 million orders. One peak-prep calendar.
Most multichannel sellers prepare for peak on the same schedule.
This report shows you that schedule, so you can see whether you’re ahead of the pack or behind, before it’s too late to catch up.
Fill out the form to download your peak readiness report.
207M
orders analyzed
Thousands
of multichannel sellers
1
readiness benchmark
Is your peak prep on time?
Every seller knows peak is coming. Far fewer know whether their prep is actually on time.
Retailers move on a predictable rhythm. There’s a window when most sellers get their tools in place and their catalogs ready, and it opens earlier than many expect. Miss it, and you head into your biggest sales period a step behind everyone else.
We pulled the data on when that window opens and closes. The report shows you the schedule most sellers follow, then gives you a one-minute way to score your own readiness.
What’s inside the report
- The peak-prep calendar. When retailers get ready, month by month, from the prep activity of thousands of Linnworks customers.
- A readiness scorecard. Five checks to place your own operation against the field in about a minute.
- The demand picture. How concentrated Q4 really is, and what that means for the pressure on your operation.
- Why more channels make it harder. How order profiles differ across marketplaces and webstores, and what that adds to your prep load.
- Expert perspective from Linnworks’ Chief Product Officer on where to focus first.
Who it’s for
Multichannel sellers and operations teams heading into Q4. If you run across marketplaces and your own webstore, this shows you whether your peak prep is on schedule or quietly running late.
FAQs
Get answers to our most asked questions about peak.
Earlier than most sellers think. Peak demand crests in late November, but the merchant base gets ready well before that, and it’s hard to catch up if you start late. A good rule of thumb: if a change to your setup needs to be in place for peak, work backward from early autumn and leave time for it to settle in. The report maps the month-by-month prep calendar most sellers follow, so you can see how much runway is left.
The retail peak lands in the fourth quarter, building to Black Friday and running through to the end of the year. It’s highly concentrated: across 207 million orders, nearly a third of the year’s orders fall in Q4, while the rest of the year stays comparatively flat. The report breaks down the shape of the year and what that concentration means for your operation.
Most sellers are set up well ahead of the rush, so if you’re still making changes close to peak, you’re likely behind the pack. The report includes a five-point scorecard that places your operation against the field.
Plan for weeks, not days. New Linnworks customers go live in 40 days on average, and any new setup needs time to settle in before demand climbs. Starting in late summer is the safe window for a system you want running smoothly at peak. The report shows when the merchant base adds its tools, and why that timing matters.
A subset of Linnworks’ global customers, aggregated and anonymized. The demand picture is drawn from 207 million orders in 2025, and the prep timing comes from multi-year averages of when sellers get ready.