Going away and wondering what to do about your current eBay listings? Whether you’re going on vacation, dealing with a family emergency or just want to take a break, you need to put your eBay Seller account on hold. This will prevent customers from buying eBay items that you can’t ship on time and giving you bad reviews. There’s an easy way to do this (eBay Store), and a hard way (without Store). Here’s how to put your eBay items on hold and enable eBay vacation mode while you’re on vacation.
How To Turn On eBay Vacation Mode Without A Store
To put your eBay listings on hold, without an eBay Store (I’ll explain what an eBay Store is in the next section), is a total pain in the ass. That’s right, there’s no easy “vacation mode” for your eBay listings. Here are your options:
- Manually End All Listings: One way to prevent someone from buying your eBay listings while you are away is to manually end every single one of your listings. However, if you end all listings, you might be charged Final Value Fees, especially if you end any auctions with bids.
- Take Your eBay Items With You On Vacation: Some people will take their eBay auction items with them on vacation. So if something sells, they can just ship it while on vacation. If you’re selling something small like cufflinks, then this makes sense. But not for bigger items that don’t easily fit in your suitcase.
- Just Ship Everything Late: Maybe your eBay items won’t sell while you’re away. That’s a risk you can take. But if something sells and you don’t ship it on time, then you should expect negatives reviews and ratings.
- Message Buyers And Ask For Forgiveness: Many people with eBay accounts are both buyers and sellers. You can always message your buyers, explain to them that you are on vacation, and ask them for forgiveness. Maybe they have been in the same situation and will understand. This won’t prevent eBay from giving you some bad feedback for late shipping, but it might help prevent you from getting negative buyer reviews.
- Temporarily Pay For an eBay Store: Upgrading your eBay account to an eBay Store is probably your best option. It will cost you about $7+ per month for a month-to-month plan, but it might be worth it. Having an eBay Store will give you access to discounted fees, more free listings per month, and additional tools like vacation mode.
- How to set up your eBay Store
- Go to the Account section under the “My eBay” menu.
- Select Subscriptions.
- Select Choose a Store. Find the Store type you’d like to subscribe to and choose Select and review.
- Select the subscription term (yearly or monthly) and enter a name for your Store.
- Select Submit order to purchase the Store subscription.
- How to set up your eBay Store
How To Put Your eBay Store In Vacation Mode
If you already have an eBay Store, turning on your vacation settings is easy. Here’s how to put your eBay Store in vacation mode. Note: You must have an eBay Store for this to work.
My eBay: Click on the My eBay link in the top navigation bar.
Messages: Click on the Messages tab on the left side of your screen.
Change Settings: Click on “Change Settings” on the right side of your screen.
Store Vacation Settings: Scroll down the page until you see a section called “Store Vacation Settings”. Select the “Turn On” option. You can also write an “out of office” message for your store page.
Additional Vacation Options: To hide your listings with fixed prices, check the box beside “Keep people from buying your fixed price listings while you’re on vacation…” Also, specify a return date.
Apply: Scroll down and click on the “Apply” button at the bottom of the screen to save your settings.
Turning Off eBay Vacation Mode: When you’re back from vacation and ready to reopen your Store, just select the “Turn Off” in the Vacation Settings.
Vacation Mode is Much Easier For Amazon Sellers Than eBay Sellers
In addition to eBay, I also sell on Amazon. Enabling vacation mode with Amazon is easy and free. You just open the Amazon Seller mobile app, tap on the gear, and then uncheck any stores that you want to temporarily turn off.
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