EBAY AND VACATION TIPS

We all take short breaks from our eBay listings every now and then.  Have you often wondered how you can prevent customers from purchasing your items while you are away for extended periods of time, but unsure how to prepare for this?  Here’s some advice on a few things to ponder and prepare for your absence without taking your items/pc/printer/shipping supplies with you!  Which believe it not, I have done often, many times myself.  Also, reasons why you don’t need to end your auctions and lose listing fees or promising sales.  You don’t need to change your handling times.  You don’t need to lose your back-links from ending auctions that you have posted on other networking sites.

Don’t have an eBay store?  You do have an eBay store?  You have auctions running?  You have fixed priced auctions running?  Worried about losing your TRS (Top Rated Seller) status?  Worried about not providing confirmation tracking on your shipments based on your handling time?  Worried about customers putting items in their shopping cart and not checking out right away? 

No problem, we can prevent sales from happening while we’re away very easily!!

eBay Store:

eBay stores provide vacation settings for you to customize or use their default settings.  You can follow these steps to do this.

You’ll also want to send an auto-reply message to any incoming messages while you’re away letting people know you’re unavailable and when you’ll return.

This method will send auto-reply messages to all incoming messages on eBay and the away message will be prominently displayed across the header in your eBay store.  It will also hide all your fixed auction listings from search pages and in your eBay store pages.

1.   Login to eBay, go to ‘my eBay’, click on the ‘account’ tab, click on ‘manage my store’, click on ‘store vacation settings’.

2.  Go to ‘out of office email response’, click on ‘turn on’, set your start date and your end date by clicking on the 'calendar icon', then either keep the default away message as-is or type in your own message.

3.  Go to ‘store vacation settings’, click on ‘turn on’, check the box next to ‘hide and block purchases from my fixed price listings'.  NOTE:  this doesn’t affect your auction-style listings.

4.  Optional:  check the box next to ‘display a return date', set your return date by clicking on the 'calendar icon'.

5.  Then either keep the default away message or type in your own message.

6.  Click on ‘apply’.

Non eBay Store:

This useful eBay feature comes in handy for actually both non eBay stores and eBay stores.  This is what will stop customers from purchasing your items in both an auction format and/or a fixed priced auction format.  It will also stop a customer from processing any order saved in their checkout cart.  However, it will not stop any pending uncompleted transactions that have closed with a buyer(s).

1.  Login to eBay, go to ‘my eBay’, click on ‘account’, click on ‘site preferences’, click on ‘show’ next to payment from buyers, click on ‘edit’,  eBay will ask you to login into your account again ‘login’, go to ‘checkout preference’ and uncheck the box next to ‘use checkout (recommended)’, click on 'submit'.

Hope this short tutorial has helped you solve the eBay vacation dilemma.  Just remember to complete those pending sale orders before you leave on your destination and DON’T FORGET to turn off your vacation settings and update your email settings and MOST IMPORTANTLY turn your checkout preferences back on when you arrive back to your home office!!

Have a wonderful worry free vacation folks!!

Photo coutesy of http://www.seamarkcondo.com