Every year, the retail trade press runs some version of the same headline in October: this holiday season will be the biggest one yet. Most years, they're right. What's changed is how fast the volume arrives and how much of it now moves through digital ordering rather than a phone call or a written order at a show — which means the strain doesn't land on your sales floor anymore. It lands on your platform.
The National Retail Federation is projecting winter holiday sales will surpass $1 trillion for the first time in 2026, up 3.7 to 4.2% year over year, with average per-person spending at $890.49, the second-highest figure in the survey's 23-year history. Adobe Analytics puts online holiday spending at $253.4 billion, up 5.3%, and expects a record 10 separate days this season where spending tops $5 billion — up from 7 such days in 2024. Deloitte's own forecast, covering November 2024 through January 2025, put total holiday sales growth at 2.3 to 3.3%, with e-commerce specifically growing 7 to 9%.
However the final 2026 number lands, the direction hasn't been in question for several years running: more volume, more of it digital, more of it compressed into fewer days.
For a wholesale brand, none of those consumer-facing numbers describe your order desk directly. But they explain the pressure arriving at it. Retailers restocking for a bigger digital holiday season place bigger, more frequent at-once orders. Buyers filling gaps discovered mid-December don't wait for a sales rep to call them back. And whatever system stands between a retailer's reorder and your inventory either keeps up in real time, or it doesn't.
Golf brands sometimes treat Q4 as a quiet season between fall closeouts and spring pre-book. The gifting data says otherwise. The National Golf Foundation's research on core golfers — the roughly 13 million players who account for more than 90% of total golf industry spending — finds that gift-giving is a routine part of the holiday season for about half of them, and that 54% of golfers have bought golf merchandise online in the past 12 months, up sharply from 38% in 2019. Golf balls, gloves, and apparel are the categories most likely to be bought online, while clubs still lean toward in-store purchases — meaning the SKUs most likely to see a last-minute digital gifting spike are exactly the ones a retailer reorders quickly and often.
That's a different kind of holiday volume than a single big pre-season order. It's a steady stream of smaller at-once and reorder activity that keeps arriving through December, often initiated by a retailer restocking after their own point-of-sale data flags something selling faster than expected.
Outdoor specialty retail told a similar story through the most recent holiday stretch. Grassroots Outdoor Alliance reported member retailers' December sales up 3.81% year over year across 89 stores, even with a shortened selling season — and outdoor e-commerce retailer Garage Grown Gear posted roughly 30% year-over-year growth, with Cyber Monday as its single best sales day ever, according to reporting from SGB Media. Looking ahead, Bain & Company's holiday forecast (also via SGB Media) projects Nov–Dec 2025 retail sales growth of 4.0% year over year, topping $975 billion — a touch below the 10-year average of 5.2%, but with e-commerce still expected to drive roughly half of that growth even as its own growth rate moderates.
Read those two data points together and the pattern for outdoor brands looks a lot like golf's: overall growth is real but not runaway, the selling window keeps getting tighter, and a larger share of it is happening through digital channels that expect real-time accuracy, not a batch update overnight.
None of this is really a story about consumer demand. It's a story about what happens to a wholesale ordering system once demand concentrates into a shorter window and a higher share of it arrives digitally. Retail Dive's coverage of the 2024 holiday season noted online Black Friday sales up more than 10% year over year and Cyber Monday up 7% — with retailers like J.C. Penney investing $1 billion in supply chain modernization specifically to keep pace. As RILA's VP of Supply Chain, Jess Dankert, put it in that coverage: "There's really no room for silos within the retailers anymore." The same is true one level up the chain, for the brands supplying those retailers.
Peak volume doesn't create new problems in a wholesale platform so much as it exposes ones that were already there, just below the threshold where anyone noticed. A daily inventory batch that's "close enough" in June starts producing real oversells in a week where a retailer's reorder cadence doubles. A manual touchpoint between order submission and ERP entry that costs a few minutes normally starts costing hours once volume triples and that same person is now a bottleneck across every order in the queue. We've written before about when wholesale order volume actually peaks across the year and the broader shift in Q4 buying patterns — holiday is simply the sharpest version of a stress test that's been building all year.
Run through this before volume actually spikes, not after:
1. Time your inventory sync. Change a stock count and see how long it takes to show up in your ordering system. If the honest answer is "overnight" rather than "seconds," that's the first thing that will oversell in a heavy week.
2. Count the manual touchpoints per order. Every person re-keying or double-checking an order between submission and your ERP is a step that doesn't scale linearly — it scales worse, right when volume is highest.
3. Check what happens to a bad order. A SKU that doesn't exist, a quantity that doesn't make sense — does your system reject it immediately, or does it get accepted and discovered later, during a week when fulfillment already has no slack?
4. Ask how retailers actually place at-once and reorder business today. Phone, email, and a written order all depend on someone being available to take it. Self-service ordering doesn't care what time it is or how many other orders are in flight.
5. Confirm your platform's infrastructure has actually been load-tested, not just assumed. Auto-scaling, multi-availability-zone redundancy, and disaster recovery aren't features you want to be discovering the limits of during your highest-volume week of the year.
6. Look at your holiday timeline against the buying data, not the calendar. If more than half of holiday commitments are being made months earlier than they used to be, a platform that only gets attention in November is already behind.
This is the gap RepSpark's ERP integrations are built to close: connecting to 20+ ERP systems across 35+ total integrations, so an inventory update moves in seconds instead of a daily batch, with zero manual touchpoints between a retailer's order and your system of record. Bad orders get caught by schema-enforced validation at the point of entry, not discovered during fulfillment. And because that connection runs on SOC 2 Type 2, PCI DSS, and GDPR-compliant AWS infrastructure with multi-AZ redundancy, it's built to hold up under a spike in December, not just a quiet Tuesday in March — the same reliability our Key Challenges in 24/7 Wholesale Ordering covers in more depth.
For the corporate and gifting-adjacent order volume that shows up specifically around the holidays — custom logoed product, branded assortments, drop-shipped orders — Event Microsites let a brand stand up a dedicated, self-service ordering experience for that spike without routing every one of those orders through a rep's inbox. And on the sales side, RepSpark's sales rep tools surface expiring drafts, incomplete orders, and quantity gaps automatically, so the orders sitting 90% finished in a rep's pipeline in mid-December don't quietly fall through in the chaos of the season.
None of this is about predicting exactly how big this holiday season will be — the trade press will keep revising that number until January anyway. It's about making sure that whatever the number turns out to be, your platform is the reason you captured it, not the reason you didn't.
The forecasts agree on the direction even where they disagree on the exact percentage: holiday volume is growing, more of it is digital, and the window it arrives in keeps getting shorter. Golf and outdoor brands are seeing their own versions of the same pressure — gifting-driven online purchases in golf, a compressed but still-growing season in outdoor. Whether your platform holds up isn't really a holiday question. It's a question about whether the gaps that are easy to ignore in a slow month get found the hard way, in your busiest week of the year, or get found now, while there's still time to fix them.
See how RepSpark is built to handle peak wholesale volume, or browse customer case studies to see how brands are running their busiest seasons on the platform.
Q: How much is holiday retail sales volume expected to grow? A: The National Retail Federation projects 2025 winter holiday sales will surpass $1 trillion for the first time, up 3.7 to 4.2% year over year. Adobe Analytics separately forecasts $253.4 billion in online holiday spending, up 5.3%, with a record 10 days this season each topping $5 billion in spend.
Q: Does the holiday order surge affect golf and outdoor brands the same way it affects general apparel? A: The underlying pressure is similar, but the pattern differs. Golf brands see a steady stream of online gifting purchases in categories like balls, gloves, and apparel — the National Golf Foundation reports 54% of golfers have bought golf merchandise online in the past year, up from 38% in 2019. Outdoor specialty retail has seen holiday sales growth even with a shortened selling season, per Grassroots Outdoor Alliance reporting.
Q: What actually breaks in a wholesale platform during peak order volume? A: Usually the same gaps that exist year-round, just under enough pressure to become visible: a daily inventory batch instead of real-time sync, manual touchpoints where someone re-keys or double-checks an order, and bad data that gets accepted and only discovered later during fulfillment instead of rejected immediately at entry.
Q: How can a brand tell if its platform is actually ready for a holiday volume spike? A: Test it directly rather than assuming. Time how long an inventory change takes to reflect in your ordering system, count how many people touch an order between submission and your ERP, and confirm your infrastructure has been load-tested for a real spike rather than just a quiet day.
Q: Why does self-service ordering matter more during the holidays specifically? A: Because retailer at-once and reorder activity doesn't wait for business hours during the busiest stretch of the year. A rep-dependent ordering process depends on someone being available to take the order; self-service ordering lets a retailer place a reorder the moment they notice a gap, whenever that happens.
Q: Is holiday demand really the best time to test platform readiness? A: No — it's the worst time to discover a problem and the best time to have already fixed it. The readiness check itself (timing inventory sync, counting manual touchpoints, confirming load-tested infrastructure) should happen well before peak volume arrives, not during it.
Q: How does RepSpark specifically help brands handle holiday order volume? A: RepSpark's ERP integrations move inventory updates in seconds instead of a daily batch across 20+ ERP systems, with schema-enforced validation catching bad orders at entry. Event Microsites give brands a self-service channel for holiday and corporate gifting order spikes, and built-in sales rep tools flag expiring drafts and incomplete orders so they don't get lost during the season's chaos.
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