Most Shopify merchants treat Mother's Day as a five-day sprint. In 2025, we analysed 30,000 Mother's Day gift messages sent through the Giftnote platform. Here is what the data tells us about what to expect in 2026.

Three Buyer Cohorts. Three Missed Opportunities.

Early Planners (18-28 April)

The first gifts are already moving. If your gift experience is not live, these orders land with no recipient follow-up, no data capture, and no path back to your store.

This cohort is gone before most merchants have switched on.

Build Buyers (29 April - 6 May)

This is where volume spikes -- and where the majority of gift orders are coming from buyers your store has never seen before. 67% of gifters on the Giftnote platform are first-time buyers for the merchant's store. Most of the gift recipients they are sending to are net-new to your brand as well.

Without a gift experience in place, those orders land in the same place: a standard post-purchase flow built for returning customers. The gift recipient gets nothing.

In 2025, Australian and US Mother's Day both fell on 11 May, compressing two markets into one window. 6 May alone was one of the highest single-day gift send concentrations of the entire season. If your store was not ready by then, that volume passed through without a single gift recipient captured.

Peak Window (7-11 May)

Volume is at its highest. If the gift experience is not working here -- delayed messages, broken delivery triggers, missing recipient flows -- it is not one unhappy customer. It is your brand failing at maximum visibility.

This is the worst possible time to be unprepared. It is also the most common time brands discover they are.

The Number Behind All Three Cohorts

78% of Mother's Day gift recipients are net-new to the brand. They did not find the store through an ad. They were not retargeted. Someone who already trusted the brand made the introduction at zero acquisition cost.

 On average, 11% of gift recipients convert to paying customers within 90 days. Gifted orders carry 25% higher AOV than standard orders.

 The acquisition opportunity exists. It is just going uncaptured.

What to Do About It

The fix is not complicated. Gift recipients need a post-delivery follow-up that acknowledges they received a gift -- not a cold marketing email -- and makes it easy to come back. That follow-up needs to fire at delivery, not at purchase, and it needs to be live before the first Early Planner gift arrives in late April.

Giftnote fires delivery-triggered notifications at the moment of the carrier delivery scan, across 1,200+ carriers. It creates a Klaviyo profile for the gift recipient and routes them into the merchant's existing flows.

More than 1,000 Shopify merchants use Giftnote to capture gift recipients at the moment that matters most. For Mother's Day 2026, that window opens the second week of April.

Don't let the gifting window open without you.