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The Downside of Putting an Amazon Store in Vacation Mode

Amazon
The Downside of Putting an Amazon Store in Vacation Mode

Every year, marketplace sellers debate whether they should put their store in vacation mode ahead of Christmas. It may be because they’re taking personal time off or because they fear negative consequences of impatient buyers not receiving their item in time to give as gifts.

There may also be other times throughout the year when sellers need to temporarily shut down their business, including emergencies such as health issues.

Sites like Amazon and eBay have features that allow sellers to put their stores in vacation mode, also known as time-away. But there are some potential consequences of using the features.

One Amazon seller said “vacation mode is for suckers” in response to a seller who cited concern about a possible negative impact on visibility once one returns from vacation mode.

The seller (with the handle Oh-Duh) wrote:

“Instead of ever going on vacation, one should add the appropriate amount of handling days and turn off all of their expedited shipping methods (which generally ignores handling time). This will help their store and product pages avoid being dropped from the search engines.

“Notice that ‘search engines’ was plural. Your products are also dropped by Google, etc. All of this apparently factors into the algorithm for Amazon search.

“Moral of the Post: Vacation Mode is for suckers. Use it as a last resort when you have an emergency, until you have time to follow the advice above.”

The discussion was prompted by an announcement by Amazon 5 days before Christmas Day, when it wrote:

Set up vacation mode for your account during holidays
If you’re taking time off over the holiday season, set your account to vacation mode to avoid overlooking orders that could affect your performance.

This setting temporarily removes your seller-fulfilled listings from Amazon product detail pages and search results.

Note: Account Health Support (AHS) will be closed on January 1, 2023, but will be back on January 2, 2023 to help with any questions on your performance metrics or policy compliance.

To set up vacation mode, go to Settings> Account Info > Going on a vacation?

For more information, go to Listing status for vacations, holidays, and other absences.

Let us know what you think of vacation mode on Amazon and other marketplaces.

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Ina Steiner
Ina Steiner
Ina Steiner is co-founder and Editor of EcommerceBytes and has been reporting on ecommerce since 1999. She's a widely cited authority on marketplace selling and is author of "Turn eBay Data Into Dollars" (McGraw-Hill 2006). Her blog was featured in the book, "Blogging Heroes" (Wiley 2008). She is a member of the Online News Association (Sep 2005 - present) and Investigative Reporters and Editors (Mar 2006 - present). Follow her on Twitter at @ecommercebytes and send news tips to ina@ecommercebytes.com. See disclosure at EcommerceBytes.com/disclosure/.