Thirty percent of US holiday shoppers say they plan to start buying gifts in September or October, and another 28 percent call themselves year-round holiday shoppers who never really stopped, according to a Tapcart survey of 1,205 US mobile shoppers, published in September 2026 and updated in October 2026. Add those two groups together and close to six in ten of your customers are already in holiday-buying mode, while most SME sales teams are still planning to start chasing Christmas revenue once Black Friday arrives.

Kevin has spent over 30 years helping businesses sell, including 9 companies founded or co-founded of his own, and the costliest sales habit he still sees every October is one you may be running right now: waiting for a date on the calendar that your customer has already passed.

Here is the enemy worth naming: the Black Friday illusion, the belief that the holiday selling season has one real starting gun and it fires in late November. The data says otherwise. Roughly 80 percent of this year's US holiday shoppers plan to have started buying before Thanksgiving week even begins, and only 17 percent are waiting for Thanksgiving and Black Friday Cyber Monday week itself. If your sales calendar, your follow-up sequence and your promotional calendar are all built around a late-November start, you are planning for the minority.

Selling into a season that already started means changing three things this week, not next month:

This is exactly the kind of calendar-reading work inside the sales plan I build with clients each Q4, because the close rate on a lead contacted in the right week is never the same as one contacted in the wrong one.

"Kevin is an absolute powerhouse! He doubled our business's profits in the first month alone with lots more of his recommendations still to be rolled out."

— Curtis Hacon, Give A Sh!t

Most sales teams know the holiday season starts earlier every year. Almost none change their own calendar to match it, because nobody owns the decision to move a campaign forward by six weeks without a clear signal that it is safe to do so. That signal is exactly what this data gives you. The gap between knowing shoppers have started and acting like they have started is the only thing standing between you and the six in ten buyers who are already moving.

If your sales calendar still starts after Black Friday, that is the first thing worth moving.

Be the owner who sells into the season your customers are already in.