Flight plan template for Ecommerce

The flight plan with three columns a store needs: which slice of the catalogue this week is selling, which promotion it sits inside, and how much stock stands behind it on the day the week starts.

Everything else is the general flight plan, unchanged. One row per week of one line of spend, a phase on every row, a share of the flight on each, and a decision point at the end of every phase.

Use it for any period built around a retail calendar rather than a reporting calendar: a season, a promotional run, a product drop. The weeks either side of a promotion decide the result, and a monthly rhythm reads straight past both of them.

Write it after the media plan is approved and before the creative is scheduled. Then read it every Monday, because stock and delivery cut-offs change what next week can honestly do.

A store's spend is lumpy by design. Promotions, drops, seasonal peaks and delivery cut-offs all set dates that have nothing to do with the end of a month, and a plan read monthly will average across exactly the weeks that decided the quarter.

That is the whole case for a weekly plan in this category. One row per week per line, a phase name on every row, and a share of the flight budget on each, so the shape of the season is visible before it is spent rather than reconstructed afterwards from an export.

The shape matters more here than almost anywhere, because a store's demand is not flat. There are weeks where the same money buys twice the attention and weeks where it buys none, and the plan is the only place to say which is which in advance.

The promotion window column exists so that no row straddles a change of offer.

A line that runs from the last full-price week into the first sale week is two lines. The offer changed halfway through, and with it the creative, the expected conversion rate, the margin and the definition of a good result. Kept as one row, the two halves average into a number that describes neither, and the average lands precisely on the period anyone would most want to read clearly.

The same applies at the other edge. The week after a promotion closes is not a sustain week; it is a wind-down week with its own weight, its own creative and its own expectation, because demand pulled forward into the sale has to come out of somewhere.

A media plan can record stock cover at planning time. A flight plan has to record it every week, because it moves.

The failure this prevents is the most expensive one a store can have: a week at full weight pointed at a segment that sold out on Wednesday. The platform will keep spending, the creative will keep performing, and the money will buy disappointment that shows up later as returns, complaints and a worse audience for the next flight.

So the cover column carries what stands behind the segment on the Monday, with the date it was read. Where cover is thin, the honest options are to lower the weight, to point the week at a different segment, or to change the creative to something that does not promise a specific item. All three are decisions; spending through it is not.

The creative set column turns rotation from a reaction into a plan. Write which assets are in market each week, and the question of whether a week moved because of weight or because of work becomes answerable.

In a store this matters more than in most categories, because creative volume is usually the binding constraint. A season's worth of assets is finite, and spending it all in the launch phase leaves the sustain phase running the same three cuts for six weeks, which is where fatigue actually comes from. Scheduling the sets across the phases, in the plan, is how a limited library is made to last the flight.

Where a set is not made yet, it is a dependency with a due date, and the due date belongs at least a week before the row that needs it.

Every seasonal flight has a date after which an order cannot arrive in time, and it is a week-level fact that belongs in this document rather than in somebody's head.

Put it in the notes on every row that runs into it, and plan the phase around it. Before the cut-off, the offer is the product. After it, the offer is something else — a gift card, a later delivery promise, a different segment entirely — and a week that carries the old message past the cut-off will convert badly for a reason the reporting cannot show.

Every phase carries at least one decision point, and in a store there are three that recur.

The first is at the end of the launch week: whether the opening weight found the audience or exhausted it, which decides whether the sustain phase widens or holds. The second is the week before a promotion: whether the stock position still supports the planned weight, which decides how much the peak can be pushed. The third is at the cut-off: whether to keep selling the product or change the offer.

Write those as questions, with the week attached, and the conversation happens on a Monday with the numbers in front of everyone.

Every week of every line has a row. Every row names a catalogue segment and a promotion window, and none straddles the edge of one. Stock cover is written against every week carrying a budget, with the date it was read. Every phase names its first week, its last week and its intent. Every dependency has a due date before the week that needs it. And every phase carries a decision point, written as a question somebody has agreed to answer.

A flight that passes those six is not necessarily a good flight. It is a flight whose weeks can be argued with before they are spent, which in a season built around dates nobody controls is the only kind worth writing down.