Getting Your Shopify Store Ready for Mother's Day

Illustration of a large blue gift box with an orange ribbon, a smaller wrapped box, a vase of flowers and a Gift note card with a green check, beside a storefront with an OPEN sign and an Order by Tuesday label

Updated September 2026

In the US, Mother's Day falls on the second Sunday in May. The UK and some other countries celebrate on different dates, so check the markets you sell to. If you sell anything that could be a gift, start about four weeks before. Most of the prep is about one thing: making the store easy for people who are shopping for someone else.

Gift shoppers behave differently from regular customers. They're often buying something they've never bought before, for someone whose taste they're not completely sure of. They care about delivery deadlines more than usual. They want gift wrap or a personal note. They may be sending to several people at different addresses: mom, grandma, a mother-in-law. And they tend to decide late, so the path from “I should get something for Mom” to “order placed” needs to be short.

A Mother's Day collection and gift bundles

Start with a collection of giftable products, linked from your homepage and menu, so shoppers don't have to guess what works as a present. Group products by price or by recipient if your range is large.

Then add a few bundles: a skincare set, a candle and card, a three-item “pamper” package at a better price than buying separately. Bundles solve the “what should I get?” problem outright. Shopify's free Bundles app handles fixed bundles and multipacks. If you want tiered discounts (buy 2, save 10%), a free gift with purchase or mix-and-match bundles scheduled to start and end with the campaign, our Volume Discounts & Bundles app does that. For a simple free gift, a native Buy X get Y discount also works, but the customer has to add the free item to their cart themselves, so say so on the page.

Sending gifts to more than one address

This happens every Mother's Day: a customer wants one gift delivered to their mom and another to their mother-in-law in a different city. A standard Shopify checkout sends an order to one shipping address, so they have to place two orders. Some do. Plenty don't.

One cart with two gifts splits into two orders: flowers and a candle go to Mom with one gift note, and a mug goes to Grandma with another. ONE CART, TWO GIFTS CART Flowers Candle Mug TO MOM TO MOM TO GRANDMA Check out once ORDER 1 To Mom “Happy Mother's Day, love you” ORDER 2 To Grandma “Thinking of you, Gran”
One cart, two recipients: each address gets its own order to fulfill and its own gift note.

Our app Multi Ship lets customers assign items in one cart to different addresses and check out once. Each destination becomes its own order for fulfillment, with a gift note and delivery instructions per address. We explain the options in more detail in ship to multiple addresses in one Shopify checkout.

Gift wrap and personal messages

If you offer gift wrap, a card message, engraving or monogramming, make it visible on the product page. Don't make customers hunt for it or email you afterwards.

  • Without an app: create gift wrap as its own product that shoppers add to the cart, and turn on your theme's cart note (most themes have one) for a gift message.
  • With product options: our Product Options app adds a gift wrap checkbox with an add-on price, a text field for the message and a date picker for delivery, right on the product page. With conditional logic, a “This is a gift” checkbox can reveal the message field only for people who need it. Add-on pricing is on its paid plans.

Make the delivery deadline impossible to miss

Late shoppers need to know the cutoff. Work out the last order date that still arrives in time for each region you ship to, allowing for your processing time and the carrier's transit time, and put it on the store well before it arrives: on the homepage, on product pages and in the cart, not only on your shipping policy page.

Your theme's announcement bar can carry the message: “Order by Tuesday for Mother's Day delivery.” To show a live countdown and switch the message automatically when the deadline passes (for example, to “Send a gift card instead”), our Announcer & Countdown app schedules both. Shopify's estimated delivery dates at checkout help too. We cover them in competing with Amazon Prime delivery.

Worth knowingGift cards are the answer for everyone who misses the shipping cutoff. Shopify sells gift cards natively. Put a link to them in your “last day to order” message, so late shoppers still buy from you instead of going elsewhere.

A few more things worth setting up

  • Limits on promotional items. If a free gift or limited bundle should go to many customers, not a few, cap it. A discount can be limited to one use per customer, and our Order Limits app can cap quantities per order on specific products or collections. See how to set minimum and maximum order quantities.
  • Wishlists for coordination. Siblings buying for the same mom can share a list so nobody buys the same thing twice. Our Wishlists app supports shareable lists and guest wishlists.
  • A phone test. Go through the whole flow on your phone as a last-minute gift buyer who's never seen your store: find a gift, add wrap and a note, and check out.

What to do this week

  1. Pick the products you want to promote as gifts and build a Mother's Day collection.
  2. Set up one to three bundles or offers, with start and end dates.
  3. Decide your order-by date for each region and put it on the store.
  4. Make gift wrap and messages easy to add.
  5. Test everything on a phone.

Not all of this applies to every store. But a clear gift collection and a visible shipping deadline are more than most stores do.

Plan the next one

Mother's Day is one campaign. After it come Father's Day, back-to-school and the holiday season. Our campaign calendar lists the dates by month and country, and our back-to-school playbook is ready for the next season.