With six weeks to Black Friday, most Shopify stores should fix two things before November: send tracking clicks to a branded page with proactive delay alerts, and lock return label rules and rates. Leave platform switches and new tracking apps until January.
A where-is-my-order ticket is not a support problem. It is a message you forgot to send, arriving back at you as a cost.
Shopify merchants sold $14.6 billion over Black Friday Cyber Monday weekend last year, up 27% on 2024 (24% at constant currency), to more than 81 million customers, according to Shopify’s own BFCM 2025 recap. Every one of those orders started a second clock the moment the confirmation email went out. The customer started watching for a package, and a share of them decided to ask you where it was before you told them.
That second clock is the subject of a new piece from Loop, Don’t Let Shipping and Tracking Break Your BFCM, published October 13, 2026. Loop is a returns and tracking vendor and a partner of this site, so I read its customer numbers as vendor case studies: real, useful, and chosen to show the product at its best. Its argument is that peak season loyalty is decided on two tracks after checkout, what happens while the order is in transit and what happens when it comes back, and that both are settled by decisions made before the volume arrives.
I agree with the argument. What a $1M to $5M operator needs on top of it is a sort: of everything worth doing, what fits in the 44 days between today and Black Friday on November 27, and what should wait. That sort is what this piece is for.
Shipping and tracking decide BFCM loyalty because the post-purchase window is the only part of the season where the customer is anxious, attentive, and waiting on you at the same time. A shopper who ignores a slow update in March will open a ticket in November, because a gift deadline is now attached to the package. The volume multiplies the orders, and the deadline multiplies the anxiety per order.
The cost of getting it wrong is easy to see in returns data. Retailers told the National Retail Federation they expect 17% of holiday sales to come back, and 19.3% of all online sales in 2025, in the 2025 Retail Returns Landscape report from NRF and Happy Returns, published October 15, 2025. The same survey of 2,006 consumers found 71% are less likely to shop with a retailer again after a poor returns experience. Those numbers come from large US retailers and their shoppers, so treat them as a sanity check rather than your forecast, but the direction is hard to argue with.
The pattern I worried about most during my years as a Senior Merchant Success Manager at Shopify was not the brand with a bad tracking page. It was the brand that knew it had one, decided to fix it in the second week of November, and ended up debugging a new app on Black Friday morning while the support queue filled anyway. The fix was right. The timing turned it into a second problem. Everything below is sorted with that failure in mind.
Loop’s customer results show that where-is-my-order tickets fall sharply when customers are told about their order before they think to ask, and that the drop comes from fewer tickets arriving, not from answering them faster. Three named brands carry the evidence, and each one is worth reading with its conditions attached.
Casely’s case study is the most useful because it shows the starting point. Ahead of BFCM 2022, roughly half of the tech accessory brand’s helpdesk tickets were some version of where is my order. After its agency added branded tracking emails and a tracking page in November 2022, Casely reports a 76% reduction in WISMO tickets within one month, nearly 2,000 tickets, about $1,880 a month in support savings, and more than 10 hours a week saved per support agent. Two conditions matter: the change went in during November, so Casely did ship before peak, and the result depended on proactive delay emails triggered from tracking events inside Klaviyo, not on the tracking page alone.
CurrentBody, which ships across 30 carriers and 22 storefronts, cut WISMO from 29% of all support inquiries to 5%, according to Loop’s article. The third case, the menswear brand David Donahue, reported $64,000 in revenue from 189 orders placed through its branded tracking page in a year, at a $336 average order value, which Loop describes as a 28x return. That is one brand with a high price point, and I would not plan around a 28x return. The point it proves is narrower and still valuable: people checking on an order are on your site with their wallet out, and sending them to a carrier page gives that visit away.
If you have read our earlier piece on cutting WISMO tickets with branded order tracking, the mechanics will be familiar. What is new here is the clock. The question for the next six weeks is not whether branded tracking works. It is how much of it you can stand up and test without creating the November debugging problem.
Three tracking fixes still fit before Black Friday for most stores: pointing every tracking link at a branded page, turning on a short set of proactive notifications, and testing the whole sequence with a real order. Each one can usually be done inside a tool you already have, which is what makes it safe this close to peak.
Start with the links. Open your shipping confirmation email, your order status page, and your post-purchase SMS, and click every tracking link as a customer would. If any of them land on a carrier’s website, that is the first change. Most stores already have some branded tracking capability in place, either through a returns or post-purchase app they pay for or through Shopify’s own order status page, and simply never switched the links over. Switching a link is low risk. Installing a new tracking platform is not.
Next, choose the notifications. The temptation is to turn on every carrier status event, and that creates its own noise. Our deeper look at why standard shipping notifications fail to stop WISMO at scale makes the case for filtering carrier updates down to the moments that change what a customer expects. For BFCM, I would limit it to four: shipped, out for delivery, delivered, and delayed. The delay alert carries the most value, because it reaches the customer before the worry does, and it is the one most stores have never built.
Then connect those events to the email or SMS tool you already run, so a delay message does not depend on someone noticing a stuck package. If your tracking tool cannot pass events to your email platform, that is a gap to note for January, not a reason to switch tools in October.
Finally, place a real order to a real address, ideally one in a different state from your warehouse, and follow every message it triggers. Check the timing, the copy, the links, and the tracking page on a phone. Do it by November 6, so there is a full week to fix what you find before most teams freeze their stack. I would rather see a store ship two of these three fixes, tested, than all three untested.
Return shipping cost at peak is set mostly by defaults, so the work this month is deciding the defaults before thousands of returns run through them. Loop’s article names three levers, and they are the right ones: compare carrier rates per shipment rather than defaulting to one, offer printer-free options like QR code labels, and route returns by product attributes such as type, vendor, weight, and destination rather than one path for everything.
Not all three fit in six weeks for every store. Rate shopping across carriers is usually a setting in a returns or shipping tool you already have, and worth checking now. Routing rules are worth setting only for your expensive exceptions: oversized items, international returns, and high-value orders, because those are the ones that cost the most when a person handles them by hand. Leave the long tail on your current default. Our breakdown of where returns money actually leaks before BFCM makes a related point worth keeping in mind: the label is usually the cheapest part of a return, and speed back to sellable stock matters more.
Two small items from Loop’s checklist deserve more attention than they get. Confirm your carrier rates will hold at peak volume (and, I would add, any label or account limits with your carriers or 3PL), and add a backup payment method for label generation, so a single declined card cannot stop labels from printing in your busiest week. Neither takes more than an hour, and both prevent the kind of outage nobody notices until customers do.
There is one item Loop’s piece does not mention, and it lands nine days from now. Starting October 23, 2026, Shopify Tax will calculate tax on return shipping fees for orders shipped to US addresses, for merchants using Shopify Tax or Tax Platform, wherever shipping itself is taxable. If you charge a return shipping fee and handle tax on it manually anywhere today, you need to switch that off before the 23rd or you will count it twice. We covered the details, including what is excluded, in our piece on BFCM returns and the Shopify Tax return shipping change. For this checklist, the action is one question to whoever owns your sales tax filings and one test return after October 23.
The following is a composite, built from patterns I have seen repeatedly in Shopify merchant conversations, not a single real store, and it carries no observed metrics. Picture an apparel brand doing about $1.5M a year, with roughly a quarter of its annual revenue landing between Black Friday and Christmas. It ships from one 3PL with two carriers, runs a returns app it bought last year, and its tracking links go to the carrier because nobody changed the default when the app was installed.
Here is what I would have that team do, in order. This week, switch the tracking links in the shipping confirmation email and order status page to the branded page the returns app already includes, and turn on four notifications with the delay alert first. Next week, ask the 3PL to confirm carrier capacity and label limits for the peak weeks, add a backup card for labels, and set one routing rule that sends international returns to a separate flow. Before October 23, ask the bookkeeper whether tax on return shipping is handled anywhere outside Shopify. By November 6, place and follow a test order and fix what breaks.
Here is what I would have them remove or not start. The team was evaluating a second tracking app because a competitor uses it, and I would stop that evaluation until January, because two tools sending shipping messages is how customers end up with duplicate texts on Black Friday. I would also turn off any carrier status notifications beyond the four above, including the in-transit scan updates, which generate traffic without reducing anxiety. And I would not touch the return policy copy beyond confirming the holiday return window, because policy rewrites in November create the questions you are trying to prevent.
The judgment call a skeptic could push back on is the decision to delay the second tool. If the current app genuinely cannot send a delay alert, waiting costs real tickets. In that case, I would still choose a manual workaround, a daily export of stuck shipments and a templated email, over a new install six weeks before peak.
What you change first depends more on what you already run than on what the best-run brands do, and the right list gets shorter as the store gets smaller. Here is how I would sort it.
If you are under $500K, this is mostly next year’s project. Make sure your tracking link works and your shipping times are stated clearly at checkout, and spend the rest of the time on the offer. If you are above $5M and run multiple warehouses, the question shifts from tracking to routing, and our overview of where Shopify’s native order routing runs out is the better starting point.
Whatever your stage, the last date that matters is the freeze. Our four-week BFCM operations playbook makes the case for locking changes in the final week before peak, and that applies to shipping messages as much as to your theme. Put the date on the calendar now, and make the list above fit in front of it.
Reduce where is my order tickets by telling customers about their order before they think to ask. Point every tracking link in your emails, order status page, and SMS at a branded tracking page instead of a carrier’s site, and send four proactive updates: shipped, out for delivery, delivered, and delayed. The delay alert matters most because it reaches the customer before the worry does. Loop reports that Casely cut WISMO tickets 76% within a month this way, though that is one brand’s vendor-published result. Test the full sequence with a real order by early November so you have time to fix problems before your code freeze.
It is not too late to switch to branded tracking you already have, but it is usually too late to install and trust a new tracking platform. Many Shopify stores already pay for a returns or post-purchase app that includes a tracking page and never changed their tracking links to use it. Switching links and turning on a few notifications is low risk and can be done in a day. Adding a new app means new integrations, duplicate messages, and testing time you may not have. If your current tools cannot send a delay alert, a manual daily check of stuck shipments is a safer bridge until January.
Send four shipping notifications during peak season: shipped, out for delivery, delivered, and delayed. Those are the moments that change what a customer expects, so they prevent questions rather than create them. Sending every carrier scan update tends to add noise without reducing anxiety, and it raises the chance of duplicate messages if more than one tool is connected. Trigger the notifications from tracking events inside the email or SMS platform you already use, so they go out automatically. Then place a test order and read every message on a phone to check timing, wording, and links.
Yes, from October 23, 2026, Shopify Tax and Tax Platform calculate tax on return shipping fees for orders shipped to US addresses, wherever shipping is taxable in that jurisdiction. States that do not tax shipping stay untaxed, and Shopify’s announcement excludes restocking and handling fees. If you do not handle tax on return shipping manually today, Shopify says no action is required. If you do, through a bookkeeper, a tax tool, or a returns app that adds its own tax line, review and switch off that workaround before October 23 so the tax is not counted twice. Process one test return after the change to confirm the tax line looks right.
Lower holiday return shipping costs by setting your defaults before the volume arrives instead of letting every return follow one label type and one carrier. Compare carrier rates per return where your returns tool supports it, offer QR code labels so shoppers without printers do not delay returns, and set routing rules for the expensive exceptions such as oversized, international, and high-value items. Confirm your carrier rates and label limits will hold at peak and add a backup payment method so labels never stop printing. Remember the label is often the smallest cost, so getting items back to sellable stock quickly matters too.
