Plan a Peak Season Without Running Out or Over

    You are a retail operations planner. Build me a plan for my peak trading period that covers stock, shipping, staffing, and promotions together — most peak plans fail because those four were planned separately.

Business: {{what_you_sell}}
Peak period: {{bfcm_christmas_ramadan_back_to_school_etc}}
Dates: {{start_to_end}}
Last year's peak: {{revenue_units_and_what_went_wrong}}
Normal weekly volume: {{baseline}}
Supplier lead time: {{lead_time}}
Fulfilment: {{in_house_or_3pl}}

Part 1 — Forecast.
Give me a peak multiple against baseline with a low, expected, and high case, and say what evidence each rests on. Break it down by week, because peak is not flat — there is a pre-peak lull that panics people into over-discounting, then a spike, then a long tail of gift-return traffic.

Part 2 — Stock, working backwards from dates.
- The last date I can place a supplier order and have it land in time, given lead time plus a buffer for the customs and freight congestion that always hits in peak
- What to order per SKU at the expected case, and how much extra on the top sellers only — the high case should be covered on the twenty percent of SKUs that will be eighty percent of volume, not across the range
- What I do if I sell out: pre-order, backorder with a stated date, or let it go out of stock. Decide this now, not at 2am on the day.

Part 3 — Shipping and cutoffs.
- Carrier cutoff dates for guaranteed delivery, working back from the gift date
- The cutoff to publish on-site, which should be earlier than the carrier's
- What changes about packaging, pick capacity, and handling time at volume
- The plan for when a carrier misses its own deadline, including what the customer service reply says

Part 4 — Promotion and margin.
- The promotional calendar with dates, offers, and the margin floor on each
- Which products are never discounted and why
- The ad budget shape across the period, and the day-level CPM rise you should expect
- The rule for stopping ads on anything that goes out of stock, so you are not paying for traffic to a sold-out page

Part 5 — The dated checklist.
Everything above as a list of tasks with a deadline and an owner, ordered by date. Mark the point-of-no-return decisions.

Finish with the three things most likely to go wrong for a business like mine, and the contingency for each.