August 26, 2016

Setting Your Ebay Store on Vacation & Handling Times

Barview Jetty
It has been some time since my last post but this one hit home for me recently and pretty hard. I’ve been selling casually on eBay for 15 years. In 2016 I decided to formalize my effort with eBay and Etsy to make a solid stream of side income and so far in 2016, things have been going great. I’m paying for an eBay basic store subscription and have had one in the past, it works out OK, I’m a Top Rated Powerseller and make the most of the FVF credits/discounts and the USPS Shipping discount (this actually helps my business model to exist).

Clamming on a Low Tide

So, we’re 8 months into 2016 and my wife and I decide to go on vacation for 8 days to the Oregon coast (art in the article, care of). I hop into my Etsy and eBay Admin panels and set my stores to Vacation Mode, think nothing of it and we take off. Over the course of the week, I’m receiving best offers and orders on eBay and happy to be doing so. I know that the buyers are being notified of my stores short closure and again, think little of it other than “hell, I’m on vacation and making cash, guess I have to ship when I get home. I should have a Corona”.

Pot Lines

The trip ended far too soon and we were back home Sunday. I received 6 orders at various points over the 8 days and packed them all to ship Monday. I navigated to the seller dashboard and was surprised to see that one of my metrics tanked over the vacation. Tracking uploaded on time and validated went from 99.89 to 93.91!

EbayVacationSettingsSuck

Being that it was Sunday, I called eBay and was alerted to a 57 minute wait time and opted for a call back. So the meat of this winded, photo filled article follows:

  1. When you put your store on vacation, the tracking uploaded/validated is still tied to your fulfillment time on each listing (I offer 1 day fulfillment to qualify for top rated)
  2. If you go below 85% on this stat, Top Rated Seller status goes into review for a 3 month period.
  3. If your want to keep this stat high you either have the bulk edit your listings to change the days to ship or delist your store…

I guess that I’m going to have to delist my ebay store when I leave town next time even if that means that I lose all my watchers on my items. Do you owner-operators have any tips on preparing your web business for vacation? If so, I’m dying to hear!

 

 

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