How to Place Your eBay Store on “Vacation”.

So you’re going away for a while, and you’re not going to be able to ship people’s orders from your eBay store? Imagine how you’d feel if you got home from a nice vacation, only to find that your feedback rating had been trashed!

Buyers can find your store, pay for items, and then complain about you for not shipping them or responding to emails – without you even being there to stop it. What’s more, no-one will accept the fact you were on vacation as an excuse: after all, what were you doing listing items on eBay if you were on vacation?

So what’s the solution to this little problem? Well, it’s easier than it sounds. Whenever you go on vacation, just make sure you don’t forget to send your eBay store on one of its own.

What Do You Mean?

eBay offer a facility to put your store on ‘vacation’, which basically means that it is temporarily suspended while you’re unavailable to ship items. This means that you don’t need to be available 365 days a year just in case someone orders from your eBay store.

How Do I Put the Store on Vacation, Then?

Go to My eBay and click ‘Manage Your Store’. Now click ‘Change vacation settings’ and choose ‘Turn vacation settings on’. Click the ‘Save Settings’ button, and it’s done. Once the settings are on, you have a few options about what you want your store to do while you’re away.

Hide your listings. You need to do this – your listings will be hidden from buyers, so they can’t bid on them. Be aware that it can take a few hours for your listings to disappear from the search results, though.

Display messages. If you want, eBay can put a message in your listings and on your store to say that you’ve gone on vacation – just in case anyone wonders what happened to you. You will be asked to say when you expect to come back. You should always do this, as it’s quite inconsiderate to just disappear without telling your loyal customers where you went!

Will I Still be Charged for My Store While I’m Away?

Unfortunately you will – not only the subscription for the store, but also for any listings that expire while you were gone. This is quite cruel of eBay, but what can you do? To lessen the impact of this, make sure you don’t list any new items for a while before you put the store on vacation.

I’m Back! How Do I Turn the Store on Again?

Click: My eBay, Manage Your Store, Change vacation settings, Turn vacation settings off, Save Settings. Everything will now go back to normal. You might want to send out a newsletter at this point, to let your buyers know you’re back.

Here’s another little headache that could get you into some trouble: eBay’s ‘VeRO’ program for copyright holders. I’ll show you how to avoid falling foul of it in the next email.