Dashain & Tihar Sales Playbook: Prepare Your Online Store for Nepal's Biggest Shopping Season

Dashain and Tihar sales can make up a huge slice of a small Nepali shop's yearly income, and yet most online sellers only start preparing when Ghatasthapana is already a week away. By then the good suppliers are booked, your delivery riders are half-packed for their village, and you are answering the same three questions in Instagram DMs at midnight. This playbook lays out what to do, in what order, so your online store is genuinely ready for Nepal's biggest shopping season instead of just surviving it.

Why Dashain and Tihar sales behave differently from a normal month

Three things change at once during the festival season, and each one breaks a different part of your operation.

• Money arrives in a lump. Most salaried buyers get their Dashain allowance before the festival, so a large share of the year's spare spending lands in a short window.
• Buying is deadline-driven. Nobody wants a kurta or a gift arriving after Dashami. "Will it reach before tika?" becomes the single biggest objection on your product pages.
• The country moves. Kathmandu empties out. Riders, packers, suppliers and courier staff travel home. Your capacity drops exactly when demand peaks.

Plan around those three facts and most of the usual festival chaos disappears.

Six weeks out: fix the store itself

The festival is the worst possible time to discover that your product pages are thin or your checkout is confusing. Do the boring work now, while traffic is still low.

Clean up your catalogue

Go through every product and ask: could a stranger buy this without messaging you? That usually means real photos from more than one angle, honest sizing or measurements, and a description that answers the questions you keep getting in DMs. Festival buyers include a lot of older relatives buying gifts, and they will not chase you for details. If you are reading this later than six weeks out, the condensed version of this work is in the guide to getting your online store ready 30 days before the festival.

Build your festival collections early

Create the collections people will actually search for — gift sets, kurta and daura suruwal, home and decor, sweets and hampers, kids' clothes — and get them linked from your homepage. Sellers still taking every order by hand through Instagram should work through setting up your online store before the festival rush, because manual order-taking is exactly what collapses when messages triple.

Four weeks out: stock, cash and suppliers

This is the window where decisions get expensive. Talk to suppliers now and confirm their own festival shutdown dates — many Kathmandu wholesalers close for a full week or more, and imported stock through the border slows down before the holidays, not after.

Split your buying into three buckets:

1. Proven sellers — go deep. These are the items you already know move.
2. Festival-specific items — buy realistically. Gift packaging and seasonal goods have no life after Tihar.
3. New experiments — keep small. Peak season is not the time to test a category.

The other four-week job is inventory accuracy. If you sell from a counter and online at the same time, you must be running one stock pool, not two spreadsheets. Overselling a gift item three days before Dashami is a refund, an angry phone call and a lost customer all at once — running one inventory across your shop and online store is the fix, and it takes far longer to set up in October than in Bhadra.

Two weeks out: offers, payments and checkout

Design offers that protect your margin

Blanket discounts are the lazy option and they train customers to wait. Better structures for festival season:

• Bundles — a gift set priced slightly under the sum of its parts. Raises order value without cutting the headline price.
• Free delivery over a threshold — set the threshold above your current average order value.
• Early-bird pricing — a better deal before Fulpati than after. This deliberately pulls orders into the window where you can still deliver on time.
• Gift wrapping — cheap to offer, genuinely useful during Dashain and Tihar, and a real reason to choose you over a marketplace listing.

Make paying effortless

Festival buyers are impatient and often shopping from a phone on a crowded street. Offer the rails they already use: eSewa, Khalti, FonePay QR, bank transfer or connectIPS, and cash on delivery. If wallets are not live on your store yet, sort it out now — provider onboarding takes days, not hours, and a checkout that only offers COD quietly loses every buyer who wanted to pay from their phone.

COD will still be a large share of your orders, and during festival season it carries extra risk: more first-time buyers, more impulse orders, more refusals when the parcel arrives late. Confirm every COD order by phone, cap COD value on high-ticket items, and be clear about return rules on the product page. There is a full breakdown in the guide to setting up cash on delivery orders the right way.

The delivery window nobody plans for

This is where most Dashain and Tihar sales go wrong. Work backwards from Dashami and publish an honest cut-off date on your site — a simple banner saying "order by [date] for delivery before tika" does more for conversion than another 10 percent off, because it removes the buyer's biggest fear.

Practical steps:

• Ask your courier — Pathao, NCM, Aramex, Upaya, whoever you use — for their exact festival schedule in writing. Inside-valley and outside-valley cut-offs are usually different by several days.
• Assume outside-valley delivery slows more than inside-valley, and say so on the product page.
• Have a backup courier registered, even if you never use it.
• Pack in advance. Pre-fold boxes, print labels, stock tape and filler — packaging supplies run out locally during peak.
• Keep selling after the cut-off, but switch the messaging to "ships after Dashain" or push gift vouchers. Do not promise what riders cannot deliver.

During the festival: run a light, boring routine

You will be busy with family. The goal is a system that survives you being away.

• Set fixed order-processing times, twice a day, and say so on your store and social pages. Silence causes cancellations; a clear "we dispatch every morning at 10" does not.
• Watch stock daily on your fastest movers and hide anything you cannot fulfil rather than letting it oversell.
• Push whatever is actually selling in your stories, not what you expected to sell.

Tihar is a second peak, not a continuation

Sellers who treat Dashain and Tihar as one long season leave money behind. Tihar buying is different: lights and decorations, sel roti and sweets ingredients, Laxmi Puja items, new clothes for Bhai Tika, and gifts exchanged between siblings. It arrives days after Dashain ends, when your stock is depleted and your team is tired.

Plan a small, separate Tihar restock in advance, with its own collection page and its own delivery cut-off dated to Bhai Tika. Because the gap is short, anything you have to reorder after Dashain will probably arrive too late. The wider festive sales playbook for Nepali shops goes deeper on splitting the two peaks, and there is a peak-season version aimed at preparing a Nepal online store for peak season if you want the operational checklist alone.

Where a proper store platform saves you

Most of the failures above are not marketing failures — they are plumbing failures. Orders lost in DMs, stock sold twice, no record of who paid what. This is where a real store platform earns its keep: Saauzi puts an online store, a counter POS and eSewa, Khalti, bank and COD checkout on one inventory, so a counter sale updates online stock instantly and every order lands in one list. If you are setting up from scratch, the festival-ready store checklist and the longer six-week Dashain preparation plan walk through the sequence in more detail.

After the festival: the part everyone skips

In the quiet week after Tihar, spend two hours doing three things: count what is actually left, note which products sold out and which never moved, and write down every delivery promise you broke and why. That single page of notes is worth more than any guide next year.

Then message your festival buyers once — a thank-you, not a discount. A first-time Dashain customer who hears from you in Mangsir is far cheaper to sell to than a new one.

Your one takeaway

If you only do one thing this season, publish an honest delivery cut-off date and build your stock plan backwards from it. Everything else — offers, photos, ads — is worth less than a customer who trusts the parcel will arrive before tika.

Ready to stop running festival orders out of a notebook and your DMs? Set up your store on Saauzi before the season starts, and go into Dashain with your catalogue, payments and stock in one place.