You know how it is - sometimes life happens and you need to take a little break, especially around this time of year in the fall. Maybe you're going on vacation, or maybe you've got a family emergency.
Whatever the reason, if you find yourself in a situation where you just can't fulfill orders, the best thing to do is to put your listings into "vacation mode." This basically means changing the status of your listings to "Inactive" on Amazon. Once you do that, your self-fulfilled products will be removed from the product pages and search results within an hour. Then when you're ready to start selling again, you can easily switch the status back to "Active."
There are a few good reasons why it's so important to switch to vacation mode when you can't deliver:
First, it's the considerate thing to do for your customers. You don't want people ordering stuff from you and then getting frustrated when you can't send it out. Putting your listings on hold lets them know you're temporarily unavailable.
And it's also really important for protecting the health of your Amazon seller account. If customers order from you and you can't fulfill, that can hurt your order defect rate and overall account performance metrics. That's the last thing you want when you're ready to start selling again.
So how do you actually set your account to vacation mode? It's pretty easy:
- From your account, select Settings, then select Account Info.
- On the Seller Account page, look for the "Store Status" section and click on "Vacation Settings"
- Next Page you will see your marketplaces, then click on "Edit" and toggle the vacation mode setting on/off.
There are a few other important things to keep in mind when you're in vacation mode:
- Make sure you have a plan for responding to any buyer messages that come in - you still need to reply within 24 hours even when you're not actively selling.
- Fulfill any existing orders before you activate vacation mode so you don't leave customers hanging.
- If possible, try to set your account to vacation mode ahead of time before you take your break. That gives you a chance to wrap up any pending orders.
Let me know if you have any other questions! The Seller Central help pages also have more details on managing your listings when you're away.
-Connor
