Every year the same thing happens in the first week of May. Someone who has never bought from you before lands on a product page, buys one candle for their mum, and is never seen again. Mother's Day is one of the biggest gift-buying weeks in retail - and one of the worst weeks of the year for customer retention.
The strategies that actually work for a Shopify store are the ones doing two jobs at once: helping a stressed gift-buyer find something fast, and giving that buyer a reason to come back in June. In practice that means a gift guide organised around who mum is rather than what you sell, wishlists so shoppers can save and return, a shipping offer with a visible cut-off date, email that respects the people for whom this day is painful, gift cards for the last-minute crowd, and a plan for the two weeks after the holiday. US shoppers spent a record $38 billion on Mother's Day in 2026, according to the National Retail Federation. The interesting question isn't how to get a slice of it - it's how much of your slice turns into a second order.
Here's what we are going to cover:
Mother's Day sits behind Christmas as one of the largest gift-giving occasions in the US calendar, and the numbers have climbed steadily. NRF and Prosper Insights & Analytics put 2026 spending at a record $38 billion, up from $34.1 billion in 2025 and above the previous record of $35.7 billion set in 2023. Per person, shoppers planned to spend an average of $284.25 - also a record. The survey covered 7,877 US adults and ran in the first week of April.
Where that money goes matters more than the headline figure, because it tells you whether your category is in the running at all:
Two findings in that survey are more useful to a small Shopify brand than the totals. First, 46% of shoppers said finding a unique or different gift was their top priority, and 39% said they were focused on creating a special memory. That's a direct argument for small, distinctive brands over big-box retailers. Second, online retailers and department stores were tied as the top shopping destination at 33% each, with specialty stores at 29%. You are not competing with Amazon for attention as badly as you might assume - you are competing for the shopper who has already decided they want something that isn't from Amazon.
Mother's Day shoppers procrastinate. That's not a character flaw, it's a planning constraint - and it means your campaign has two distinct audiences with almost nothing in common.
Start promoting three to four weeks out. The early group is browsing, comparing and deciding, and they need inspiration and reassurance about delivery. The late group - and it's a big group - is panicking four days before with no idea what to buy. They need speed, a clear delivery cut-off, and ideally something that doesn't need shipping at all.
Practically, that means your campaign is not one campaign. It's an inspiration phase, then a deadline phase, then a digital-gift phase for the people who missed the deadline. Most stores build the first and forget the other two, which is why so much Mother's Day traffic converts on the Monday before and nowhere else.
Let's be honest - finding a gift for a mum who already has everything is genuinely hard, and it's the single biggest reason people abandon a gift-shopping session. A gift guide solves that, but only if it's built the right way round.
The mistake is organising by product category, because your shopper doesn't know what they want. They know who they're buying for. Organise by recipient instead: the gardener, the reader, the one who's impossible to buy for, the new mum, the mum who insists she doesn't want anything. Etsy has built this into a genuine acquisition channel with curated gift guides by recipient and interest, and it works because it matches how people actually think when they're stuck.
Keep each guide short. Six to eight products beats thirty - the whole point is to reduce choice, not add to it. And put an add-to-cart button directly under each item, so a decided shopper never has to navigate away.
Where a wishlist earns its place: a large share of Mother's Day browsing happens on a phone, in a spare five minutes, days before anyone is ready to buy. If the only options are buy now or lose the page, you lose the page. Letting shoppers save items - and emailing them when a saved item drops in price or comes back in stock - turns that browsing session into a return visit.
We have numbers on this. Our wishlist report, based on activity across 227 live Shopify stores, puts median wishlist revenue at $9,821 per store over six months - and 96% of that comes from the on-site widget alone. That is the revenue a store earns simply by letting people save things as they browse.
The alert emails sit on top of it, and most stores never turn them on. Back-in-stock notifications add a median 8.5% additional revenue for the stores using them; price-drop alerts add another 8.6%. In a week where your best gift items are the first to sell out, back-in-stock is the one you want running.
Timing is the other reason this matters. In a multi-industry study of 49,000 merchant accounts, Swym found the median shopper takes 41 days between wishlisting an item and buying it, with 74.7% of purchases happening within 30 days. So a shopper who saves something in mid-April and buys nothing is behaving completely normally - and if nothing brings them back before the weekend, that is a sale you simply never see.
Lily Charmed, a UK jewellery brand, cut cart abandonment by 22% after adding wishlists and reviews - and jewellery, per NRF, is the single largest Mother's Day gift category. Worth knowing if that's your shelf.
How many times have you found something you wanted, then lost all enthusiasm at the shipping fee? Unexpected extra costs are the single biggest reason checkouts get abandoned - Baymard Institute puts it at 48% of abandonments, well ahead of forced account creation (26%) or a checkout that drags (22%).
For Mother's Day specifically, free shipping does something extra: it removes the last excuse to keep browsing elsewhere. If you can't absorb it on every order, set a threshold - it doubles as an average order value lever - or apply it only to the products in your gift guide, which conveniently pushes traffic exactly where you want it.
The part most stores get wrong is the deadline. A free shipping banner with no cut-off date is a nice offer. A banner reading "order by Tuesday for Mother's Day delivery" is a reason to buy today. Put the date in the banner, in the email subject line, and on the product page - and update it as the deadline moves closer.
Shoppers expect a deal on the occasions that matter - Christmas, Valentine's Day, Black Friday - and Mother's Day is no exception. But a straight percentage discount on a gift purchase is the weakest option available to you, because the person paying isn't the person receiving. They're not price-sensitive in the usual way. They're anxiety-sensitive.
Options that tend to work better on a gifting occasion:
Whatever you choose, use a trackable code. Without one you'll finish the campaign with a revenue number and no idea which of these actually moved it.
Your shopper's inbox in the last week of April is a wall of identical Mother's Day promotions. Segmenting helps - past gift-buyers, people who saved something to a wishlist, and people who bought for themselves are three different audiences and should not receive the same email. If your loyalty and wishlist data lives in the same place as your email tool, this is a ten-minute job rather than a project. Growave pushes loyalty and wishlist events straight into Klaviyo for exactly this reason.
If you want a starting point for wording, there are plenty of subject line templates to work from. These are some of ours:
Now the part almost nobody plans for. For a meaningful number of people on your list, Mother's Day is the hardest week of the year - because they've lost their mother, because they've lost a child, or because motherhood is a subject of grief for reasons they haven't told you. A cheerful promotional email lands very differently for them.
In 2019 the UK florist Bloom & Wild did something unusual about this: they emailed their entire list and offered people the option to opt out of Mother's Day messaging entirely. The response was strong enough that they built it into a permanent programme, the Thoughtful Marketing Movement, now with more than 170 member businesses including Etsy and Wagamama. It was raised in the House of Commons, where an MP called for a voluntary code on sensitive promotions. Marks & Spencer runs its own version, with the admirably blunt subject line "Prefer not to hear about Mother's Day?"
The commercially interesting part came later. Bloom & Wild's head of retention reported that customers who opted out had a lifetime value 1.7 times higher than those who didn't - partly because the alternative for many of those people was unsubscribing from everything, permanently.
Setting one up is a single email, a preference flag and a suppression segment. Send it two to three weeks before you start the campaign proper, keep it plain text, and make it easy.
Digital gift cards are the answer to the shopper who arrives on the Friday evening before Mother's Day. No shipping deadline, no stock risk, revenue collected upfront, and the redemption happens later - often at a higher value than the card itself.
Two things make them work harder. Give the card a decent presentation - a designed email, a printable PDF the buyer can hand over - because part of what they're buying is not looking like they forgot. And promote them specifically in the last 72 hours rather than leaving them buried in a footer. That's when the people who need them are looking.
Store credit works similarly and is worth considering as an alternative to discounting: instead of 15% off today, the buyer gets a balance to spend on themselves later. You keep the margin now and buy a reason for them to return.
Here's the section most Mother's Day articles skip, and it's the one that decides whether the campaign was worth running.
A gift buyer is a strange customer. They bought something they will never use, in a size or style they didn't choose, for a person who isn't them. Nothing about that purchase predicts a second one. Left alone, they don't come back - which is why a huge Mother's Day week can be followed by a genuinely poor June.
What helps is giving them a reason that has nothing to do with the gift. A points balance sitting in their account. A first-purchase reward that expires in eight weeks. A review request that arrives after delivery, not before. A referral offer, since someone who has just bought a well-received gift is unusually well placed to recommend one.
Here is what that is actually worth, measured properly. Growave's 2026 Loyalty Report covers 227 Shopify stores running a loyalty program. Comparing each store's repeat purchase rate in the six months before installing against the six months after, the median went from 15.1% to 19.0% - a median lift of 4.4%, with 57% of stores improving.
We publish that figure rather than the far more flattering one. Compare customers who redeem rewards against customers who don't and the gap looks roughly three times bigger - but that mostly measures which customers were already engaged, not what the program changed. The before-and-after number is smaller and it means something. On a cohort the size of a Mother's Day week, a few points of repeat rate is a real number of orders.
And the median is the middle, not the ceiling. Andiata, a Finnish womenswear brand, saw repeat purchases grow 19.2% in the six months after installing - four times the median lift.
If you want to work out what that would look like against your own retention numbers rather than a median, that's a conversation worth having - book a demo and our team will run through it with you.
Mother's Day is one of the largest gift-buying occasions of the year, and for a Shopify store the mechanics are not complicated: a gift guide organised by recipient, wishlists so browsers can come back, a shipping offer with a real deadline, an incentive that suits a gift purchase rather than a self-purchase, email that segments properly and offers an opt-out, and gift cards for the last-minute rush.
What separates a good Mother's Day from a good May is the week afterwards. Plan that part in April, alongside everything else - the same way you'd plan any holiday marketing campaign. The traffic arrives whether or not you're ready for it. Whether any of it comes back is the part you control.
x
Three to four weeks before the date. Use the early weeks for inspiration content - gift guides, bundles, ideas by recipient - then switch to urgency and delivery deadlines in the final ten days, and promote digital gift cards in the last 72 hours for shoppers who have missed the shipping cut-off.
US consumers were expected to spend a record $38 billion on Mother's Day in 2026, according to the National Retail Federation and Prosper Insights & Analytics, up from $34.1 billion in 2025. The average planned spend per person was $284.25. Jewellery was the largest single category at $7.5 billion, followed by special outings, electronics, flowers and greeting cards.
Gift buyers are less price-sensitive than self-buyers, so a straight percentage off is usually the weakest option. Free gift with purchase, complimentary gift wrapping with a handwritten note, curated bundles and points or store credit back all tend to perform better, because they make the gift feel more considered rather than cheaper.
It's worth doing. Bloom & Wild introduced a Mother's Day email opt-out in 2019 and went on to found the Thoughtful Marketing Movement, now over 170 businesses. The brand reported that customers who opted out had a lifetime value 1.7 times higher than those who didn't, largely because the alternative for many of them was unsubscribing from all communications permanently.
Give them a reason to return that isn't connected to the gift: a points balance in their account, a first-purchase reward with an expiry date, a post-delivery review request, or a referral incentive. Across the 227 Shopify stores in Growave's 2026 Loyalty Report, the median repeat purchase rate rose from 15.1% in the six months before installing a loyalty program to 19.0% in the six months after, with 57% of stores improving.
.svg)
