What is the Best Time to Send eCommerce Emails?

You scheduled it for Wednesday morning. Best day, everyone says. 

You hit send, watched a few opens trickle in over coffee, then got pulled into your day. 

By the time you looked again, it was basically over: a handful of opens, fewer clicks, and that quiet was it the offer, or just the wrong moment?

Rewind your last sales email and try to place the exact moment it lost people. 

The hour it landed? The morning open that never became an afternoon click? The Sunday send that felt safe and slipped past everyone? 

Most store owners can't point to the moment, which is exactly why "best time to send" stays so slippery, whether it's a promo, a Wednesday campaign, or a full sales push.

A few patterns do hold almost everywhere, and each one points to a section below:

• The day beats the hour. Owners agonize over 8 vs. 10 AM when the real swing is Tuesday vs. Sunday, and one "safe" day quietly underperforms. We map that first.
• Opens and clicks aren't the same moment. People open in the morning and buy hours later. Miss that gap and a well-timed send still flops.
• Two dates a month break the pattern. A payday effect the weekly chart hides, and it changes when you'd send a promo.
• The most underused slot isn't morning. It's a mid-day window nobody schedules into.
• Weekends and holidays rewrite all of it. The 4th of July and Black Friday run on different logic entirely.

Data Sources:

• Global Data and Marketers Association Email Benchmark
• Mailjet’s Email Engagement Report

⚠️ Note: Apple's Mail Privacy Policy automatically reports emails as opened, irrespective of whether the email has actually been opened – meaning, actual opens may be lower than what you would expect. 

Timing is the cheapest lever you're not pulling

You're feeling this if your open rates swing wildly from send to send, same list, same kind of offer.

A great email that lands in a dead inbox never gets the chance to be great.

That's all timing does: it buys your subject line, your offer, and your brand the moment they need to actually be seen. 

It won't rescue a weak offer, and it won't paper over a subject line nobody opens. But it's the one variable you can fix this week without rewriting a single word.

Here's why the "right time" isn't the same for your store as the one in the chart. Run these against your own list:

• How big is it? A 2,000-person list and a 200,000-person list don't peak at the same hour.
• Where are they? One timezone or five changes everything about a single send.
• How many are work inboxes? A B2B-leaning list opens on a completely different rhythm than a consumer one.
• How often do you already send? Send too frequently and timing stops mattering, because people have started skimming past you at a glance.

That last one is the quiet problem. You can nail the hour and still get ignored if you've trained your list to tune you out. Timing gets you the open. What you do with the rest is the next few sections.

Best Times To Send eCommerce Emails For Each Day Of The Week

You're reading this section if you've been sending on the same day out of habit and never tested whether it's the right one.

Before we start: none of this applies to your triggered emails. Cart abandonment, welcome flows, back-in-stock, those fire off subscriber behavior, not a clock, so leave them out of this entirely. What follows is only for the campaigns you choose to schedule.

The days don't line up in a neat Monday-to-Sunday ranking. 

They cluster by what people are doing when your email lands, and once you see the three groups, the timing stops feeling random.

The heads-down days: Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday

You're seeing this pattern if your emails get opened, but the clicks come in weirdly late, or not at all.

These are work days, and that single fact drives everything. 

People open on their phones early, often mid-commute, then vanish into their day.

The open happens in the morning; the action happens later. Send too late, and you miss the open window entirely; treat the morning open as the finish line, and you miss the buy.

Two of these four days are quietly your best of the entire week, and it's not the two most people pick. One is the strongest open day there is, which is why "just send Tuesday" is advice you'll hear everywhere. 

The other is a mid-week day most owners write off as a dead zone, and they're leaving its evening slot completely unused. The morning-versus-evening split is different for each of the four, and getting it wrong is why a "good day" send still underperforms.

The specific windows, day by day:

• Monday. A busy, distracted day. Opens peak around mid-morning but they're work-reflex opens, not shopping ones, so the real engagement lands at lunch and again late evening. Get in early, between 7 and 9 AM, so you're already sitting there when attention frees up. Best for light promotional sends and upsell/quiz emails that are easy to engage with.

• Tuesday, the open-rate champion. Opens and clicks peak around 11 AM, but the reason not to just fire at 11 is that people keep circling back through the afternoon and evening even when few brands are sending. 11 AM, then 3 to 5 PM, then 8 to 9 PM all pull. Best for low-effort promotional emails.

• Wednesday, the underrated one. Mid-week focus means daytime interaction stays flat, which is exactly why most owners avoid it, and exactly why it's open. Skip the crowded morning and own the evening: 7 to 8 PM is the slot for a store like yours. Best for engagement and loyalty emails, product updates.

• Thursday, the mini-Friday. Mornings see unusually low sending volume, so you're less buried, and Thursday evenings record the highest open rates of the week. 9 to 10 AM to catch the quiet inbox, or 5 to 8 PM to ride the evening peak. Best for discount and "selling fast" emails.

Notice the shape already: the chart's flat "8 AM is best" collapses the moment you look at a real week.

The shopping days: Friday, Saturday

You're seeing this if your weekend sends feel like a coin flip; sometimes they land, sometimes they're gone by the time you check.

This is when people plan and actually spend, and it rewards a completely different rhythm than the heads-down days. 

One of these two generates more revenue per email than any other day of the week, and it has a hard cutoff you can watch happen in your own numbers: cross it and opens fall off a cliff. The other is a stock-up morning with the shortest usable window of the week, and a small, risky evening slot most people never test.

• Friday, the revenue day. The highest revenue per email of the week, but front-loaded. Opens and clicks drop steeply after 5 PM, so the usable window really runs 8 AM to 2 PM. This is your last-chance countdowns and back-in-stock sends. Get them in before the afternoon fades.

• Saturday, the stock-up morning. Early mornings win, 5 to 7 AM and again 10 to 11 AM, because shoppers are restocking before the day gets away from them. Opens are lower than a weekday morning, but people still click. After 11 AM it fades, and Saturday evening holds the lowest open rates of the week. If you gamble on a later send, 6 to 8 PM is the only slot worth it. Good for "here's what you missed" and replenishment emails.

The reset day: Sunday

You're seeing this if your Sunday newsletter does better than you expected and you've never known why.

Sunday is its own animal: people are in chill mode, stocking up for the week and quietly prepping for Monday. 

There's one moment on Sunday when opens, clicks, and click-to-open all peak together, the only time that happens all week, and if you're sending Sunday without hitting it, you're spending your best window on nothing.

• Sunday. That triple-peak lands at 10 AM, making the 9 to 11 AM window ideal for newsletters and personalized sends. A second wave builds from 4 PM onward (likely the Monday-prep crowd), with 5 PM and 7 PM the sweet spots. Newsletters are the natural fit here.

Putting the week together

Zoom out, and the pattern is human, not technical: people have almost no room for your email during focused work hours, so the sends that win are the ones already waiting when attention loosens, at lunch, in the evening, on a slow weekend morning. 

Opens cluster around 9 to 10 AM on weekdays and 7 to 8 AM on weekends; conversions concentrate around 7 PM on weekdays and 6 to 8 PM on weekends.

But notice what just happened. You now have a published map, and it's better than the one-line "send at 8 AM" version. It's still not yours. 

Every window above is an average waiting to be corrected by your own open data, and one more thing worth holding onto: around 44% of people unsubscribe when a brand emails too often, so the right time only works at the right frequency. Which day is your day, and how you'd find it, is where we're headed next.

Best Times to Send Emails During Holidays

Here's what breaks during the holidays: the rules above assume a normal inbox, and the holiday inbox is anything but. 

A typical subscriber already gets well over a hundred emails a day, and that number spikes hard across the BFCM weekend. 

Your perfectly-timed 8 AM Tuesday send is now buried under fifty others sent at the same "optimal" time. The best practice the rest of the year becomes the crowded lane during the holidays.

So you do the opposite of what the chart says, and you send into the gaps:

• Go early or go late. The quiet windows are 6 to 8 AM and 7 to 11 PM, when send volumes dip and your email has room to be seen. The hours everyone avoids are the hours worth using.
• Warn people first. This works far better if you've told subscribers in advance to watch for you at odd hours; a heads-up send a few days out turns a strange time into an expected one.
• Keep it short. Holiday attention is thinner than usual, and shorter emails consistently outperform. Save the long-form sends for quieter months, especially on weekends.
• Still test your normal times. Switching things up is the play, but don't abandon your usual optimal slots blindly. Run them against the odd-hour sends and let the numbers settle it.

The through-line for the whole season: when inboxes are loudest, the borrowed schedule everyone's using is worth the least, and your own testing is worth the most.

How Convertcart built Greentoe a holiday calendar that drove 46% of assisted revenue

Greentoe had a subscriber base of 130,000+ that was sitting largely unused, with no structured plan for the moments that matter most. 

HTML code so the three images of the emails are shown beside each other with scroll

Convertcart built them a campaign calendar organized around exactly these high-volume windows, which are Thanksgiving, Black Friday, Cyber Monday, and their own promotional events, and timed the re-engagement deliberately instead of blasting the whole list at once. 

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Those promotional campaigns went on to drive 46% of the store's total assisted revenue through the platform, at a revenue-per-recipient of $20.19. 

The takeaway isn't the size of the list. It's that a deliberate, well-timed cadence turned a dormant audience into nearly half the assisted revenue.

You can read the full case study on how Greentoe improved their email conversrate rates.

⚠️

Great email campaigns get shoppers to your store, but what happens once they land is a different problem.

That's where a conversion audit comes in.

Request a free audit →

Here’s what the final report will contain:

• Product discovery – barriers that prevent shoppers from finding items
• Category/collection pages – improvements that drive deeper product exploration
• Product page – what to optimize to convert 2–3x more buyers
• Cart – ways to ease hesitation and speed up purchase decisions

“The report was deep and super insightful. Can’t believe it’s free.”

Logan Christopher CEO, Empire Herbs

How To Determine The Best Sending Time For Your eCommerce Store?

Everything above was the borrowed map. This is where you draw your own, and it's the reason a store your size can outperform brands ten times bigger on email: they're sending to an average, and you're about to send to your people, at the hours they've already shown you they open.

The method doesn't care about your campaign type, list size, or goal, because it reads all of that from your own history instead of a chart. Here's how it works, start to finish.

1. Earn some data first

If you're a newer sender, you don't have a pattern yet, so begin with the published times from the sections above and just send. After at least three campaigns, you'll have enough open history to stop guessing and start reading. Everything below depends on those first few sends existing.

2. Turn your open history into segments 

Nearly every ESP lets you group subscribers by when they open. Build these five from the opens on your last three emails:

• Early-Morning Openers, roughly 4:00 to 6:29 AM
• Morning Openers, 6:30 to 11:59 AM
• Afternoon Openers, 12:00 to 4:29 PM
• Evening Openers, 4:30 to 8:20 PM
• Late-Night Openers, 8:21 PM to 3:59 AM

Now the count in each segment tells you the truth about your list that no chart can: this is when your subscribers actually show up. If your list is small or you send fewer than three or four times a month, build the segments from the last two opens instead. And if you captured location at signup, you can refine these further by timezone, which matters more than most owners think.

3. Match the send to the segment, not the calendar 

Some campaigns run on a fixed clock no matter what: an event email follows the event, a referral email wants work hours later in the day, around 1 to 5 PM when people can actually act. But anything that needs real attention, a newsletter above all, should be built around your segments rather than blasted at one time. 

Here's the pattern for a Sunday newsletter, split into four sends:

• Morning version, 10 AM, to your Morning Openers
• Afternoon version, 3 PM, to your Afternoon Openers
• Evening version, 7 PM, to your Evening Openers
• Catch-all version, noon, to everyone who doesn't fall into a timing segment yet

That fourth send is the one people forget. You always need a version for the new, the erratic, and the not-yet-sorted, or you quietly drop a chunk of your list from every campaign.

4. Leave your triggered emails alone. 

This is the guardrail from the very top of the article, restated because it's where owners over-optimize. 

Cart abandonment, welcome, thank-you, and order-update emails run on the subscriber's action, not your clock, and they already earn the highest open rates precisely because they're relevant in the moment. Send them immediately (cart and browse sends within 1 to 3 hours). 

The exception: behavior-driven drips, like a post-first-purchase nudge or a milestone email, can use send times, so those you optimize.

5. Time your follow-ups by segment too

When a flow has a second email, don't fire it on a blind delay. 

Send the first email on its trigger, wait a day or two, then check which timing segment the subscriber belongs to and send the follow-up into their window: 8 AM for a Morning Opener, 7 PM for an Evening Opener, a sensible mid-morning default for everyone else. A 2 AM purchase gets an instant confirmation, sure, but the next touch waits for a human hour.

6. Build a resend path for the ones who ignored you. 

About 21% of opens happen in the first hour, and roughly 80% within 24 hours, so if an email hasn't been opened a day later, the timing or the subject line let it down, not the offer. Don't let it sit. After a 24-hour delay, resend the same email with a fresh subject line into the subscriber's open window. It's the cheapest re-engagement move there is, and most stores never build it.

7. Then test against everything above. 

Your audience may not behave like anyone's benchmark; a younger list can flip the whole pattern toward evenings. Once you have a baseline, test the real variables: day versus night, weekday versus weekend, one segment window versus another. 

Two cautions that decide whether the test means anything: a weak subject line will sink any send regardless of timing, so fix that first, and schedule at odd-numbered minutes, 3:57 rather than 4:00, to sidestep the pile-up of mass emails all scheduled on the hour.

That's the whole method. The published times got you a starting line; your open segments are the finish. From here, "best time to send" stops being a question you look up and becomes something your own list answers for you, every campaign.