Every year, the same thing happens. June rolls around, and thousands of Shopify store owners scramble to throw together a last-minute EOFY sale. They slap 20% off everything, blast one email to their list, and hope for the best.
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The result? Thin margins, lukewarm engagement, and the sinking feeling that they left serious money on the table. Meanwhile, the brands that planned their EOFY campaign 8-10 weeks in advance? They’re clearing dead stock at healthy margins, acquiring new customers through smart ad spend, and setting up their second half of the year with clean inventory and a fat customer list.
Here’s what most store owners don’t realise: EOFY is Australia’s second-biggest retail event. Australians spent an estimated $10.5 billion during the 2025 EOFY sales period, and 71% of shoppers actively planned to buy — up from just 38% the year before. With cost-of-living pressures pushing 76% of consumers to hunt for deals during sale events, EOFY isn’t optional anymore. It’s a revenue engine you need to build properly.
This is your complete playbook. Whether you’re a solo founder doing $20K a month or a growing brand pushing past $100K, this guide walks you through every phase of EOFY planning — from the inventory audit you should be doing right now, to the final-hours email that squeezes out every last dollar on June 30.
Phase 1: The Audit (8-10 Weeks Before June 30)
The biggest mistake brands make with EOFY is treating it like a discount event. It’s not. It’s a strategic stock clearance, customer acquisition, and revenue acceleration moment — but only if you know exactly what you’re working with before you start.
Start with your inventory. Pull up your Shopify product reports and sort by units sold over the last 90 and 180 days. You’re looking for three buckets:
- Dead stock (180+ days sitting). These are the SKUs collecting dust in your warehouse. They’re costing you money in storage and tying up cash you could be reinvesting. These get the deepest discounts — 40-50% off — because recovering any margin is better than holding them into the new financial year.
- Slow movers (90-180 days). Not dead, but not earning their keep. A 25-35% discount is usually enough to accelerate these without torching your margins. Bundle them with popular items for even better results.
- Moderate sellers (60-90 days). These need a nudge, not a fire sale. A 15-20% discount or a “buy 2, get 10% off” offer keeps the perceived value high while moving units.
- Best sellers (under 60 days). Here’s where most brands go wrong — they discount their winners. Your best sellers don’t need 30% off. A modest 5-10% discount (or none at all) maintains your margin where it matters most. If anything, use your best sellers as a draw to get people into your store, then cross-sell the slower stock.
Set your revenue target. Look at last year’s June performance (or your best sale month if this is your first EOFY push). Set a realistic stretch target — typically 30-50% above your average month. Then work backwards: if you need $60K in revenue and your average order value is $120, you need 500 orders. That tells you exactly how much traffic and how many email sends you need to generate.
Phase 2: Build Your Discount Architecture (6-8 Weeks Out)
Flat discounts are lazy. “20% off everything” trains your customers to wait for sales and erodes your brand over time. Smart EOFY discounting is tiered, strategic, and protects your most important margins.
The Tiered Discount Model is your best friend here. Instead of one blanket offer, create multiple discount levels tied to your inventory velocity (the buckets you identified in Phase 1). This means your homepage might say “Up to 50% off for EOFY” — which is technically true for your dead stock — but your best sellers stay at full price or modest markdowns.
Here’s a practical setup in Shopify:
- Create an “EOFY Sale” collection using automated rules. Tag products based on their discount tier (e.g., “eofy-50”, “eofy-30”, “eofy-15”). Use Shopify’s automatic collections to pull these in dynamically.
- Use Shopify’s compare-at pricing. Set the original price as the “compare at” price and the sale price as the actual price. This shows the crossed-out original price on product pages and collection pages — a proven conversion driver.
- Consider spend-based incentives alongside product discounts. “Spend $150, get $20 off” or “Free express shipping over $100” encourages larger carts without discounting individual products further. These work brilliantly for your best-seller range where you don’t want to cut prices.
Set your margin floors. Before you publish any discount, calculate your break-even on every tier. If your landed cost on a product is $40 and you normally sell it for $100, a 50% discount puts you at $50 — still $10 margin per unit. But if you’re paying $60 landed cost, 50% off means you’re losing money. Run the numbers on every tier before you commit. Your accountant will thank you.
One move that works particularly well for Australian brands: bundle slow movers with complementary best sellers. If you sell skincare, pair your slow-moving body lotion with your best-selling face serum in an “EOFY Bundle” at 20% off the combined price. The customer feels like they’re getting a deal, you move the slow stock, and your effective discount on the serum is minimal.
Phase 3: Build Your Email Sequence (4-6 Weeks Out)
Email is where EOFY campaigns are won or lost. The data is clear: stores that send 4 or more emails during a seasonal sale generate 2-3x more revenue than those sending a single blast. And yet, most Shopify stores send one “EOFY SALE IS HERE” email and wonder why their open rate was 18% and nobody bought anything.
Here’s the 6-email EOFY sequence that consistently outperforms for ecommerce brands:
Email 1: VIP Early Access (3-5 days before launch). Send this to your most engaged segment — repeat buyers, high-AOV customers, and anyone who’s opened 3+ emails in the last 90 days. Give them first access to the sale before the general public. Subject line example: “You’re in early — EOFY deals before everyone else.” This email alone can drive 25-30% of your total sale revenue because these people already trust you and are primed to buy.
Email 2: Sale Launch (Day 1 — June 1). Your main event. Send to your full list. Lead with your biggest discount (the dead stock at 50% off), but make sure the email also features your best-selling categories. Use urgency — “EOFY Sale is live. Ends June 30.” Include your top 3-4 deal categories with direct links to each collection page.
Email 3: Category Spotlight (Day 7). Pick your best-performing category from Week 1 and go deeper. If fashion performed well, showcase the top 6 items. If health and beauty moved, build a “stock up and save” angle. This email re-engages people who opened Email 2 but didn’t buy — which is typically 70-80% of openers.
Email 4: Flash Sale / Mid-Sale Bump (Day 14). By week two, momentum slows. Inject fresh urgency with a 48-hour flash sale within the sale. “This weekend only: extra 10% off everything already on sale.” This stacks on top of existing discounts and creates a new reason to buy. Countdown timers in emails increase click-through rates by 9-30% — use them here.
Email 5: Last Chance (3 days before end). Send to everyone who hasn’t purchased yet during the sale. Lead with social proof — “Over 800 orders placed this EOFY” — and highlight items that are almost sold out. Fear of missing out is real, and it works.
Email 6: Final Hours (June 30 morning + evening resend). This is your closer. Send it in the morning with a subject line like “Ends tonight: EOFY sale closes at midnight.” Then resend to non-openers 4-6 hours before midnight with a different subject line. This final push typically generates 15-20% of total sale revenue. Emails sent within 24 hours of a sale ending see a 35% lift in transaction rates.
If you’re using Klaviyo, set all six emails up as campaigns (not flows) so you have full control over timing and audience. Use Klaviyo’s Smart Sending feature to avoid over-mailing subscribers who’ve already purchased. If you’re on Omnisend, the campaign builder works similarly — just make sure you’re excluding recent buyers from your later sends.
Phase 4: Prepare Your Store and Ads (3-4 Weeks Out)
Your store needs to look like a sale is happening the second someone lands on it. Too many brands run EOFY campaigns that drive traffic to a homepage that looks exactly the same as any other day. That’s a conversion killer.
Homepage updates:
- Hero banner. Replace your standard hero with an EOFY-specific banner. “EOFY Sale — Up to 50% Off” with a clear CTA button linking to your sale collection. Make sure it’s mobile-optimised — over 65% of Australian ecommerce traffic comes from mobile devices.
- Announcement bar. Add a sticky announcement bar at the top of every page: “EOFY Sale — Ends June 30. Free shipping over $100.” This stays visible as people browse and reinforces urgency on every page.
- Countdown timer. Install a countdown timer app (Essential Countdown Timer Bar or Hextom are solid Shopify options). Place it on your homepage, collection pages, and cart page. Countdown timers consistently lift conversion rates because they create genuine scarcity — the sale really does end at midnight on June 30.
Sale collection page. Create a dedicated “EOFY Sale” collection with all discounted products. Sub-divide it with tags so customers can filter by category. This becomes the primary landing page for your ads and emails. Make sure it loads fast — a slow checkout kills conversions, but a slow collection page kills them even earlier.
Paid advertising. EOFY is worth dedicated ad spend. Here’s how to approach it:
- Meta Ads: Create a dedicated EOFY campaign with two ad sets — one retargeting your website visitors and email subscribers (warm audience), one targeting lookalike audiences based on your best customers (cold). Your warm audience will convert at 3-5x the rate of cold, so allocate 60% of your budget there. Use carousel ads featuring your deepest discounts to stop the scroll. If you need help structuring this, check out our guide on Meta Ads account structure.
- Google Ads: Increase your branded search bids — when people search “[your brand] EOFY sale,” you need to own that top spot. Add EOFY-specific sitelinks and callout extensions. If you run Shopping ads, make sure your product feed reflects the sale prices.
- Budget: Plan to spend 40-60% more on ads during June than a normal month. The CPMs are higher because everyone’s advertising, but the conversion intent is also higher. A well-targeted EOFY campaign should deliver 4-6x ROAS for warm audiences.
Phase 5: The Warm-Up (1-2 Weeks Before Launch)
The two weeks before your sale launches are critical for building anticipation. You want your audience primed and ready to buy the moment the sale goes live.
Social media teasing. Start dropping hints on Instagram and Facebook 10-14 days before launch. “Something big is coming for EOFY” with a blurred product image. “The biggest sale we’ve ever run drops next week.” These posts don’t need to convert — they need to create mental bookmarks so your audience remembers to check back.
SMS opt-in push. If you have an SMS list (or you want to build one), this is the perfect time. Run a pop-up on your site: “Get exclusive early access to our EOFY sale — sign up for SMS alerts.” SMS open rates sit around 98% compared to email’s 20-25%, making it a powerful channel for time-sensitive sale announcements.
Retarget past EOFY buyers. If you ran an EOFY sale last year, create a custom audience of everyone who purchased during that period. These people have already demonstrated seasonal buying behaviour — they’re your highest-probability converters. Hit them with a Meta ad: “Last year you saved $X during EOFY. This year’s deals are even bigger.”
Test your checkout flow. Place a test order through your entire checkout process. Make sure discount codes apply correctly, shipping rates are right, and your payment gateway is processing cleanly. Nothing kills EOFY momentum faster than a broken checkout on launch day. Our checkout optimisation guide walks through exactly what to test.
Phase 6: Launch and Maximise (June 1-30)
Sale is live. Now the real work begins. The brands that crush EOFY don’t just launch and forget — they actively manage the campaign every single day.
Daily monitoring checklist:
- Revenue vs target. Are you tracking towards your goal? If you’re behind after Week 1, it’s time to increase ad spend or send an unplanned email to re-engage.
- Stock levels. Check your top-selling discounted products daily. If something’s about to sell out, either restock fast or pull it from the sale and replace it with another slow mover. Running out of your hero product mid-sale is a conversion disaster.
- Ad performance. Review your ROAS daily. Kill underperforming ad sets quickly and reallocate budget to winners. During a sale, you can’t afford to let poor performers drain budget for a week before you notice.
- Email engagement. After each email send, check open rates and click rates within 4 hours. If Email 2 underperformed, adjust your subject line strategy for Email 3. A/B test subject lines on every send if your list size supports it.
Mid-sale flash sale. Around June 14-15, inject a 48-hour flash sale. Pick 10-15 products and add an extra 10-15% off. Promote it with a dedicated email (Email 4 in your sequence) and bump up your social posting frequency. This mid-month push typically generates a second spike in revenue that fills the gap between launch excitement and end-of-sale urgency.
The final 72 hours. This is where the magic happens. Consumer psychology around deadlines is powerful — people who’ve been “thinking about it” all month finally pull the trigger. Send your Last Chance email (Email 5) three days out, then your Final Hours email (Email 6) on June 30 morning with a resend to non-openers at 6pm. Update your announcement bar to show a live countdown. If you’re on social media, go hard with Stories and Reels — “24 hours left,” “12 hours left,” “Last chance.”
Phase 7: Post-Sale — Set Up Your Next 6 Months
The sale ends at midnight on June 30, but your work isn’t done. The first week of July is when smart brands convert their EOFY momentum into long-term growth.
New customer nurture sequence. Every first-time buyer from your EOFY sale should enter a post-purchase email flow. Welcome them, tell your brand story, and make a second purchase offer within 14 days. Customers acquired during sales have a lower average retention rate — roughly 25-30% compared to 40-50% for full-price buyers — but a strong nurture sequence closes that gap significantly.
Review and document everything. Within the first week of July, while the data is fresh, document your results:
- Total revenue vs target
- Revenue by email (which of the 6 emails drove the most?)
- Ad spend and ROAS by campaign and audience
- Best-selling products and categories
- Inventory cleared vs remaining
- New customers acquired and their average order value
- What worked and what you’d change next year
This becomes your playbook for BFCM in November and next year’s EOFY. The brands that improve year over year are the ones that actually review their results instead of just celebrating the revenue number and moving on.
Clean up your store. Remove all EOFY banners, countdown timers, and sale collection pages by July 2. Revert your compare-at pricing. Update your homepage hero. Your store should feel fresh for the new financial year — lingering sale assets make your brand look stale and train customers to wait for discounts.
The EOFY Planning Checklist You Can Steal
Here’s a condensed checklist you can copy and use right now. Print it, stick it on your wall, or drop it into your project management tool:
8-10 Weeks Out (Now — Late April)
- Audit inventory — identify dead stock, slow movers, moderate sellers, best sellers
- Set your EOFY revenue target based on last year’s data
- Calculate margin floors for each discount tier
- Review last year’s EOFY performance (if applicable)
6-8 Weeks Out (Early May)
- Build your tiered discount structure in Shopify
- Create your EOFY sale collection with product tags
- Set compare-at pricing on all sale products
- Plan your 6-email sequence and write the copy
4-6 Weeks Out (Mid May)
- Build and schedule all 6 emails in Klaviyo or Omnisend
- Create ad creatives for Meta and Google
- Design homepage hero banner and announcement bar
- Install and configure countdown timer app
1-2 Weeks Out (Late May)
- Start social media teasing
- Send VIP early access email
- Launch retargeting ads to past EOFY and recent buyers
- Test your entire checkout flow with a test order
June 1-30 (Live)
- Launch sale and monitor daily
- Send email sequence on schedule
- Run mid-month flash sale
- Execute final 72-hour push
- Monitor stock levels and ad performance daily
July 1-7 (Post-Sale)
- Activate new customer nurture sequence
- Document full results and learnings
- Remove all sale assets from your store
- Brief your team on what worked for BFCM planning
The Compound Effect: Why EOFY Is About More Than June Revenue
The real value of a well-run EOFY campaign isn’t the revenue number — though that’s nice. It’s the compound effect across your business.
You clear dead stock, which frees up cash and warehouse space for fresh product going into the second half of the year. You acquire hundreds of new customers who, if nurtured properly, become repeat buyers over the next 6-12 months. You build your email and SMS lists with high-intent shoppers who’ve demonstrated willingness to spend. You generate data — what products moved, what channels performed, what messaging resonated — that makes your BFCM campaign in November dramatically more effective.
And perhaps most importantly for Australian store owners: you start the new financial year on July 1 with clean books, fresh inventory, and a clear picture of what’s working. That’s a powerful position to be in. Tracking which channels actually drove your EOFY results is critical here — if you’re not set up for proper attribution, read our guide on ecommerce marketing attribution before June hits.
EOFY sales have grown 75% since 2019, and Australian online spend hit $82.6 billion in 2025 — up 14% year on year. The opportunity is massive and it’s only getting bigger. But the window is closing fast. If you’re reading this and you haven’t started planning, you’re already behind the brands that have. The good news? You still have time. Start with the audit this week. Build your email sequence next week. And by the time June 1 rolls around, you’ll have a campaign that actually delivers.
Inside the eCommerce Circle, EOFY planning is one of the core seasonal playbooks we work through with every member. We help you set your targets, build your discount architecture, and execute a campaign that protects your margins while maximising revenue. If you want a second set of eyes on your EOFY plan — or you want someone to build it with you — let’s talk.
