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.
Decided to go on holiday this Christmas, the country we are travelling to has poor internet so only way to really use our phone will be wifi which is ok if we are in an area with free wifi, we are travelling around so that is unlikely.
My concern is this ‘Any buyer-seller message received while on holiday will still require a response in 24 hours.’ This could be a big problem and could set our account in bad standing.
Any thoughts for you guys
Shop Status and Holiday Settings
If you are preparing to go on holiday, or if you would like to temporarily remove your open listings from the Amazon stores, use this feature. Any buyer-seller message received while on holiday will still require a response in 24 hours.
It’s always been the case that you still need to respond to messages an a-zs within 24 hours
The respond to messages used to be a metric on your account but hasn’t been for some years
You could set up an out of office on the email address that your amazon messages forward to
Obviously though if it was a delivery enquiry etc, it wouldn’t stop the buyer going straight to a-z
Wouldn’t it be nice if you can schedule holiday settings like you can on eBay?
So today I can setup I am on holiday from 24th Dec to 3rd Jan and then not worry I must remember to set it on 23rd and take them off on the 3rd myself.
As Little Shop says, as long as the auto responder messages come from an e-mail on your accepted e-mails list (message settings) it would work and give you some more time however remember the messages will most likely show as responded to on Amazon so you would have to go through your “read” messages to reply to them.
I find A-Z’s opened seem to never “require” appeals at first on our side, “no action required” while under review I believe it states, only after the decision is made they then grant you 30 days to appeal.
Yes! Unbelievable how they make simple things so difficult.
Another one that is a pain in the *** for us is, because we sell on all EU marketplaces and all EU countries have very different holidays over the year, we can not input the holidays of our warehouse location to the other marketplaces meaning it’s always a headache of adjusting handling time (in time) on the different marketplaces.
Same as just not being able to input a number in your default handling days, it would have saved lots of people headaches the last few weeks instead of having to do it through flat file uploads.
I’ve put holiday settings on for the first time ever.
I think I’m on the brink myself. Had enough of begging DPD to collect our parcels on a daily basis, waiting till 6.30 for amazon shipping to collect and being mandated to work weekends.
Will have a sit down with the staff in the new year and see what they want but none of us are particularly happy about the demands not knowing when we’ll finish each day and having to work weekends and again wait around for collections which are not on time.
Unfortunately you aren’t allowed a holiday from Amazon, they own you… or at least they think they do.
The irony in all this is that while we are expected to be at the beck and call of customers and answer messages with 24 hrs, whenever we want service from Amazon they can drag their feet for weeks (or even months) on end and think it’s perfectly acceptable.
To be honest I have never paid much attention to replying within 24 hours to a general query. It used to be a metric, and Amazon still inform you when you are late, but its never affected my account.
I purposely take a break at the weekend. I may login on a saturday morning but then leave it for the rest of the day and all sunday
Am I taking a risk? Possibly. if its an A-Z response needed
Is my mental health better? Yes!!
It maybe Amazon platform but at the end of the day its my business and in all honesty Amazon should be concentrating on their business and not telling me (actually trying to force me) to run it in another way.
You are only mandated to work weekends if you are selling via Prime
Soon after they brought that policy in I stopped listing as Prime delivery. Instead I reduced my prices and added Premium shipping options so customer could upgrade to equivalent Prime type delivery instead (with the exception of shipping at weekend). It made no difference to my sales but at least I now have weekends free.
To be honest I have never paid much attention to replying within 24 hours to a general query. It used to be a metric, and Amazon still inform you when you are late, but its never affected my account.
There might not be a metric but its still being measured. If you go onto any seller profile it shows you the average time it takes a seller to respond to messages. Who knows if that has any weight in the buybox algorithm?
It may well be in the buy box algorithm - but we do not know as Amazon keep that a secret.
I reply to messages mon-sat morning within 24 hrs - so the few I may get on a sunday will hardly affect the overall percentage.
The benefit to me personally of having a free sunday far outweighs some possible affect the metric may have on me getting the buy box.
But we all must run our businesses as we see fit. If you are happy to login and reply every single day then fine - but for me I prefer having the break.
That’s fair enough, i wasn’t criticising you but just giving you my take. You could consider setting up an out of office or auto responder for Sundays and reply to the those on Monday.
I literally do 1/10th of the sales if I do not use prime, and that’s with offering free next day delivery as a non prime option.
We currently have the exact situation, our prime button is not showing for our SFP offers with no explanation from customer support other than “we are escalating” and our sales for seller fulfilled offers are off a cliff edge.
We all object to working on the weekend here, see no reason why we cannot offer prime Monday - Friday and then have a prime badge removed for the 24 hours from Friday afternoon to Saturday afternoon and our offers reduced exposure in line with other prime offers taking their place.
It should be our choice, not something that is forced upon us, and I acknowledge the response of “don’t use prime then” I simply don’t accept it as a valid argument as to why using prime Monday-Friday should force you to work on the weekend.
Another example of how we are forming a negative opinion of Amazon as a company within our staff.
Anyone else unable to access the holiday setting? when I go to select ‘Going on Holidays?’, it asks me to select which marketplace - go to the UK one and it says I am not authorised to access the page and to contact the administrator?
I am the administrator/main account user and I tried to add myself more setting options but nothing worked. We always used holiday settings for the past 8 years, this year we had to manually stop all listings to prevent issues over the week we were closed.
