A UK sourcing calendar for resellers, built as a route plan

Most UK sourcing advice answers the question "which shops?" and stops there. That leaves the harder question untouched, and it is the one that decides whether a Saturday pays: which shops, this weekend. A Boots run in the second week of January is a different trip from the same run in June. A toy shop is worth an hour of driving on 28 December and close to worthless on 28 November, when the same shelves are full at full price.

The UK retail year has a shape, and it repeats. Not to the day, and never to a timetable anyone publishes, but the shape is reliable enough to plan around. This is that shape, written for a seller who lists on Amazon, sources in store at weekends and wants to know where to point the car in a given fortnight. At the end there is the part most calendars miss: how to turn a list of months into an actual route, and how to build your own version from what you find rather than from what a guide says.

Why a calendar beats a favourite shop

Clearance is not luck and it is not generosity. It is shelf space. A shop has a fixed amount of it, and a large part of that space is committed to a season: Halloween, then Christmas, then Valentine's, Easter, summer and garden, back to school. Every one of those has a date after which the stock behind it is worth less to the retailer than the space it occupies. That is the moment prices fall, and it is the moment worth driving to.

The consequence for a seller is that the same store is a different opportunity at different times of year, and two shops on the same retail park can be at opposite ends of their cycle in the same week. A seller who always goes to the same three shops on the same Saturday is sampling the year at random. A seller working a calendar is at the right kind of shop in the weeks when that kind of shop has something to clear.

One caution before the months: a national calendar tells you which weeks are worth a trip, never which branch. Individual stores move at their own pace, set by how much they have left and how fast it is going. Treat what follows as the frame, and your own notes on your own stores as the detail.

The UK reseller's year, month by month

Late September to October: Halloween, and the first gift sets

Halloween now occupies real space in the discount chains, the supermarkets and the toy shops, and it is a short season with a hard end. Nothing clears before 31 October, and the interesting week is the one immediately after. Costume, decoration and themed confectionery lines have nowhere to go, and the space is needed for Christmas.

October is also when Christmas gift sets start landing in health and beauty, which matters for a different reason: it is the month to learn what the range looks like, so that in January you know which sets were widely stocked and which were not. Back-to-school remnants are usually gone by now, and whatever is left is sitting at its final price.

November: a price-cut month, not a clearance month

Black Friday has grown into most of November, and it is worth being precise about what it is. Those are promotional price cuts on stock the retailer very much wants to sell, not clearance on stock it needs to be rid of. Some of them are genuinely good buys. The difference that matters to a seller is that a promotion ends and the price goes back up, so the line is not a repeatable supply, and everybody else can see the same offer.

November is also the worst month to expect seasonal clearance in store. The shelves are full on purpose. If you want to be buying in November, the trade is retailer and brand price drops rather than reduced bays, which is a desk job rather than a trip.

Late December to mid January: the biggest window of the year

If you only worked one part of this calendar, it would be the fortnight from Boxing Day. Christmas stock is the largest seasonal commitment any of these chains makes, and on 25 December it becomes a problem. Toys, gift sets, confectionery, decorations, crackers, stationery sets and novelty lines all come down, usually in stages rather than in one cut, and the stages continue into the second and third week of January as the shops keep needing more space.

Two habits separate a good Boxing Day fortnight from a frantic one. The first is knowing before you set off which stores near you are the large formats, because a big store had more Christmas space and therefore has more to clear. The second is going back: a store picked over on 27 December often has a deeper cut on 4 January, because the reductions were staged and the reductions are not finished.

January to February: gift sets, then Valentine's

January belongs to health and beauty. Christmas gift sets are the clearest example of a line that cannot be carried over, and Boots and Superdrug carry a lot of them. The interesting part for a seller is that a gift set is a bundle, so its Amazon listing is often its own product with its own history, and the good ones sell for months after the shops have finished with them.

Valentine's is a short, sharp version of the same cycle: it builds through late January and clears from 15 February. The volumes are small compared with Christmas, but the window is predictable and almost nobody is competing for it.

March and April: Easter, on a date that moves

Easter is the one season you cannot put in a fixed week, because the date moves by more than a month between years. Easter Sunday falls on 28 March in 2027, so the clearance window is late March and early April that year, where in 2026 it ran into mid April. Work it backwards from the date rather than from the month, and check the date before you plan the trip.

Easter confectionery is the obvious buy and it is also the most competitive, so be honest about the maths: dated stock, heavy for its value, and a listing that a lot of other sellers will be piling into at the same time. The quieter buys in the same clear-out are the non-food lines, the gifting, the novelty and the licensed items that came in alongside the eggs.

May to July: garden, summer, and the range reviews

Late spring is a building season rather than a clearing one, which makes it the quietest stretch of the year for seasonal clearance and the best stretch for the other kind of find. Chains review their ranges through the year, and a line being dropped from the range is reduced whatever the month. Those reductions are not on anyone's calendar, they do not announce themselves, and they are the reason a shop is worth a look in a dull month.

From the back end of July the summer and garden clear-out starts: garden, outdoor toys, paddling pools, BBQ, sun care and insect repellent. Sun care is worth a specific mention, because it is a high-value, well-branded category that clears every year and has real demand on Amazon well outside the British summer.

August to early September: back to school, and the reset

Back to school is a genuine seasonal event in the supermarkets and discount chains, and it clears quickly once term starts. Stationery, lunch gear and branded school lines come down in the first weeks of September. This is also the point where the seasonal aisle resets towards Halloween, so the same trip can catch the end of one season and the start of the next.

Which chains the calendar actually points at

A calendar is only useful if you can name the shops. Here is the scale of the problem in our own data, because it changes how you should read the busy weeks above.

retailscout's store database holds 13,880 UK locations across 15 retailer chains. Split by the kind of shop the calendar sends you to:

• The toy specialists: 367 stores - Smyths Toys 124, The Entertainer 130, Game 113. The January toy clear-out is the single best-known window in the reseller year, and it is fought over in a national network smaller than Tesco's convenience estate.
• The discount and seasonal chains: 1,536 stores - B&M 704, Home Bargains 589, The Range 243. These carry a seasonal aisle all year round, which is why they turn up in almost every month above.
• Health and beauty: 2,514 stores - Boots 1,822, Superdrug 692. The January gift-set window, and the most branches of any category on this list.
• The four big supermarkets: 7,041 stores - Tesco 2,999, Morrisons 1,574, Sainsbury's 1,531, Asda 937. The biggest network by a distance, and the one where format matters most: a large proportion of those pins are convenience branches with a fraction of the range and very little seasonal space.

Those counts were read from our store database on 19 September 2026, and each branch is classified by its name and shop type, so treat them as the shape rather than a census. The shape is the useful part. It says the January toy window is a branch-choice problem before it is a timing problem: with 367 shops in the country, the difference between a good Boxing Day and a wasted one is which two you drive to, not which day you go. Our guide to the best shops for retail arbitrage in the UK goes chain by chain on what each is actually good for.

Turning the calendar into a route

A calendar tells you what kind of shop to be in this fortnight. A route decides whether you get round enough of them to make the day worth the fuel. The two only work together if you plan them together, which in practice means picking the week's theme first and then building the loop around it.

A worked example, for the Boxing Day fortnight. The theme is Christmas clear-out, so the anchor is the largest toy shop or discount store within reach, not the nearest one. Around it go a large supermarket with a proper clearance section, a health and beauty store for the gift sets, and a second discount store on the way home. Four or five stops, ordered so you are not crossing your own path, with the anchor early enough that you still have boot space and patience when you get there.

That is the job retailscout's route planner does. It finds the stores near you across all 15 chains, filtered by retailer and by store size so the convenience branches stay off the list, lets you pick which go on the loop, orders them into an efficient driving route and hands the whole thing to Google Maps, Apple Maps or Waze, addressed by store name and postcode so you arrive at the entrance rather than the delivery yard. Routes you run every season can be saved and rebuilt, which is how a calendar stops being a document and becomes a habit. If you have a spare couple of hours and no plan, the randomise option will size a mixed route to the time you actually have.

Between trips, the other half of the year is the drops: retailer and brand price cuts that you catch at a desk rather than in an aisle. Those feeds are refreshed through the day, and the radars sweep the brands and shops you have asked them to watch, which is what keeps November and May from being dead months.

Build your own calendar, because yours will be better

Everything above is the national frame. The version that makes you money is local, and you can only get it by writing things down. Three habits are enough:

• Log what you find, with the store and the date - After two cycles you will know that one particular branch always cuts a fortnight later than the others, which is worth more than any published guide.
• Note what you saw and did not buy - A full-price shelf of seasonal stock in October is a note to come back in January, not a wasted look.
• Look at what other people found - Members share finds against the store they came from, so you can see what has been coming out of a particular branch before you commit the drive to it.

The point of the calendar is not to be right about the country. It is to stop you sampling the year at random.

Q4 changes the numbers, not just the dates

One thing a calendar cannot tell you is whether a seasonal buy is actually profitable, and in the last quarter of the year that answer moves. Amazon charges a higher fulfilment rate over the festive period and storage costs more in the autumn months, so the same item at the same cost is worth less in November than it was in September. A Christmas buy also has to reach a fulfilment centre in time to sell, which makes the inbound date part of the decision rather than an afterthought.

If you are planning the Q4 end of this calendar, read it alongside Q4 in your numbers: peak fees, storage and timing, which goes through what changes and when. The calendar tells you when to be in the shop. The numbers tell you whether to put the case in the trolley.

The mistakes that cost the most

• Chasing the date and ignoring the branch - The right week at a small store beats nothing, but the right week at the largest store within reach is the whole trip.
• Going once - Seasonal reductions are staged. The second visit is often the better one.
• Treating promotions as clearance - A Black Friday price cut is temporary, visible to everyone and not a supply you can plan around.
• Buying the season too late to sell it - Seasonal demand on Amazon has an end date too, and stock that arrives after it becomes next year's storage bill.
• Forgetting dates on cleared food - Confectionery and seasonal food clear because the date is approaching. Amazon checks dated stock on arrival.
• Assuming last year's date - Easter moves, and a chain can reset a season a fortnight either side of where it did last time. Check before you drive.

The short version

The UK sourcing year has roughly six windows worth planning a trip around: the week after Halloween, the fortnight from Boxing Day, January gift sets, mid February, the fortnight after Easter, and the summer and garden clear-out from late July into September. November is for price drops rather than reduced bays, and the quiet months are for range reviews, which happen whenever a chain drops a line. Pick the theme for the fortnight, build a route around the largest relevant store rather than the nearest, go back a week later, and write down what you saw. Do that for a year and you will have a calendar that beats this one, because it will be about your stores.

retailscout plans profitable sourcing trips and catches retailer price drops between them. It is £14.99 a month for the lot, with a 7-day free trial, and you can cancel anytime.