eCommerce Content Calendar
Most content calendars fail in February. Not because the plan was wrong, but because it was built forwards from whatever week it was started in, with no trading dates in it and no way of telling whether anything had actually been briefed. This one is dated, it has the commercial year already in it, and it counts what is real.
FORMAT
XLSX
CONTAINS
4 tabs
LAST UPDATED
September 2026
LICENCE
Free, unrestricted
A calendar is a commitment device. Its job is to make the gap between plan and output visible.
- Why this one
Content calendars do not fail at the planning stage
They fail three weeks in, when the only thing anybody can remember is what is due on Friday.
The distance between a content plan and published content is measured in briefs, not in ideas.
The common failure is not laziness. It is that most calendars are built forwards from the week they were started, so the trading dates that should govern everything arrive as surprises. A Christmas gift guide published in December has missed the demand it was written for by about six weeks.
- The weeks are already dated, so you plan backwards from peaks
- Trading dates are on their own tab, with the moveable ones calculated
- Every row has an owner and a brief date, or it is marked as an idea
- Pillars stop the calendar filling with whatever was easiest to produce
- Six counters show what is actually briefed rather than what is hoped for
It is a spreadsheet rather than a tool, which is deliberate. A calendar nobody opens because it lives behind a login is worse than one that lives in a shared drive.
- What is inside
Four tabs
Small on purpose. A planning file that takes an afternoon to maintain will not be maintained.
Read me
What each column is for, the one rule worth keeping, and six counters that read the Calendar tab and tell you how much of the plan is real.
- Definitions for all fourteen columns
- Counters for planned, idea, briefed, in draft, scheduled and live
- A five-step order for filling it in the first time
Calendar
Fifty-two weeks from October 2026, three rows a week, already dated. Fourteen columns per row covering the plan, the owner and the outcome.
- Week commencing and month, pre-filled for a full year
- Pillar, channel, campaign, title, format and target
- Owner, brief due, publish date and status
- Link, so the calendar becomes an archive you can audit
Trading dates
Seventeen dates covering the commercial year, with the moveable ones calculated rather than left to you, and the genuinely variable ones labelled as such.
- Black Friday, Cyber Monday and Thanksgiving, dated
- Easter and Mothering Sunday, which move every year
- Market column, so you can delete what you do not sell to
- A planning lead time against each one
Pillars
Five content pillars with definitions, seven channels, and the seven status values the counters depend on. Replace the pillars; keep the statuses.
- Pillar definitions you can argue with and rewrite
- Channel list including product and category page copy
- The exact status words the Read me counters match on
Nothing in the file is locked, protected or hidden. If a structure does not suit you, change it.
- The columns
What each column is actually for
Fourteen columns. Four of them decide whether anything ships.
Column
What goes in it
Why it earns its place
Week commencing
The Monday of the publishing week, pre-filled for 52 weeks
Dated weeks let you plan backwards from a trading date. Overwrite column A to re-base the whole calendar.
Pillar
Which of your three to five pillars this serves
The column that stops a quarter of content quietly becoming whatever was easiest to make.
Channel
One channel per row
A blog post and its email are two pieces of work. Treating them as one row is how the email never gets written.
Asset title
The working title
The counters read this column, so an item without a title does not exist as far as the file is concerned.
Primary keyword or audience
One query, or one audience
Two targets on one asset means neither is served. This column is where that argument happens early.
Owner
A named person
Not a team, not a function. Unowned rows are the ones that slip, every time.
Brief due
When the brief has to exist
The real deadline. Content slips at the brief and then arrives late at the publish date, where everyone notices.
Status
Idea, Briefed, In draft, In review, Scheduled, Live, Dropped
The only column with fixed values, because the counters match on them exactly.
The remaining six columns are month, campaign, format, publish date, link and notes. Useful, but none of them decide whether the work happens.
- How to use it
Filling it in the first time
About two hours for a quarter, if you have your trading dates and your pillars settled.
01
Set your pillars before anything else
Open the Pillars tab and replace ours with three to five of your own. If you cannot name them, that is the work to do first; a calendar built without them becomes a list of whatever was convenient.
02
Mark your trading dates on the calendar
Go to the Trading dates tab, delete the markets you do not sell to, add your own peaks, then write the campaign name into the Campaign column on the weeks that lead up to each one.
03
Work backwards from each peak
Search content needs six to twelve weeks to index and settle. Email needs a fortnight. Paid creative needs approval time. Put the publish date where the demand is, then set the brief date far enough ahead of it to be honest.
04
Fill the always-on weeks last
Once the peaks are placed, the remaining weeks carry your standing pillars. This ordering is the whole point: peaks are fixed, always-on content is flexible, and most calendars do it the other way round.
05
Give every row an owner or mark it Idea
A row with a title and no owner is a wish. Marking it Idea is not a failure; it keeps the counters honest and stops the plan looking fuller than it is.
06
Review monthly against the counters
Filter by month, look at the Read me counters, and ask one question: how many things marked Briefed last month are still Briefed? That number is your actual capacity.
Plan one quarter properly rather than a year loosely. The fourth quarter of a year-long plan is fiction in every organisation.
- Getting it wrong
Six ways content calendars die
All six are survivable. All six are easier to avoid than to fix in March.
Planning forwards from today
It guarantees that every trading peak arrives with two weeks notice. Place the peaks first and fill the gaps afterwards.
Rows with no owner
An unowned row has no failure mode, which is why it never ships and never gets discussed. A name makes it real.
Planning at a cadence nobody can hold
Three posts a week on paper and one a fortnight in reality is worse than planning one a fortnight, because it hides the real capacity behind a plan that was never achievable.
No pillars, or pillars nobody uses
Without them the calendar fills with whatever was easiest to make, which is almost never the buying-guide content that earns money.
Treating the publish date as the deadline
It is the visible date, not the governing one. If the brief date is not in the file, the publish date is a hope.
Never recording the link
Without the Link column the calendar is a plan you throw away. With it, it becomes a year of work you can audit, refresh and reuse.
If you recognise more than three of these, plan one quarter at a realistic cadence rather than repairing the year.
DOWNLOAD
eCommerce Content Calendar — XLSX
Fifty-two dated weeks from October 2026, three planning rows per week, seventeen trading dates with the moveable ones worked out, five content pillars you can replace, and six counters that read your status column.
FORMAT
XLSX spreadsheet
TABS
Read me, Calendar, Trading dates, Pillars
ROWS
156 planning rows, pre-dated
LICENCE
Free, commercial use
No email address, no sign-up and no watermark. Two example rows sit at the top of the Calendar tab and should be deleted before you start.
- Questions
Content calendar FAQs
What people ask before downloading it.
Do I have to give you an email address?
No. The file downloads directly, there is no form, and nothing is added to a list. If it is useful you can come back; that is a better filter than a gate.
Will it work in Google Sheets?
Yes. Upload the XLSX to Drive and open it with Sheets. The six counters are COUNTA and COUNTIF formulas, which behave the same in both.
Why does it start in October 2026?
So the first quarter you plan covers peak trading. Column A is ordinary text, so you can overwrite the dates to start wherever you like without breaking anything.
Why are some trading dates left as approximate?
Because they genuinely are. Amazon confirms its sale events only a few weeks ahead, and back to school varies by country and by state. Printing a confident date we had invented would be worse than labelling it.
How many pillars should I have?
Three to five. Fewer and the calendar becomes repetitive; more and the pillars stop excluding anything, which was their only job.
How far ahead should I plan?
One quarter in detail, the next quarter in outline, and the trading dates for the whole year. Detailed year-long content plans are rewritten by March in every organisation we have worked with.
Does this replace a project management tool?
No, and it is not trying to. It is the planning layer, which is the part most tools handle badly because they are built around tasks rather than around a trading year. Copy rows into whatever you use to run the work.
Can I share or modify it?
Yes. Use it commercially, rename it, strip our pillars out, hand it to a client. No attribution required and nothing to accept.
- Keep going
Related templates and reading
TEMPLATE
Where the Primary keyword column comes from: demand, intent and mapping, in one sheet.
TEMPLATE
For the weeks where the planned content is product page copy rather than an article.
SERVICE
What we do when the constraint is production capacity rather than planning.
Planned it and cannot produce it?
A calendar only helps if something fills it. If the constraint is capacity rather than planning, that is a conversation worth having before the next quarter starts.