It’s Labor Day Weekend! Time to do a little partying, maybe travel to a nice sunny part of the country. Me–I’m heading up to Chicago/Michigan for a little lake-house + golf action with some friends. I’m super pumped and can’t wait to get up there and have a good time.
The problem is…I’ve got about 80 items up for sale on eBay right now, 60 of which are Buy-It-Now items.
What do I do?
Obviously I don’t want any buyers to get pissed at me and leave me negative feedback (which we all know is pretty much the worst thing that can happen to you as an eBay seller). I won’t be able to send anything until I get back on Tuesday, but some of my auctions end on Sunday night and the Buy-It-Now products could go at any time. Surely there must be some way to notify your buyers right?
Well here’s what I found:
It turns out the only way to find/edit “Vacation Settings” you need to have an actual eBay STORE. Which means you need to pay about $15 a month. From there you can set everything so it notifies buyers of your absence, etc. You can set “Out of Office” replies, but that’s pretty much pointless unless you’re too lazy to respond to random questions about your items.
So what did I do?
Nothing.
And it turned out to not be a big deal AT ALL. I simply notified each buyer as soon as they made their purchase and told them I wouldn’t be able to ship until Tuesday (a few days later). Some people didn’t respond, but most were extremely understanding. Plus it was a holiday weekend so there was a certain expectation level–which was appreciated even more with my email update.
One thing I did do, however, was change my “handling time” on some of my more popular items to 3 days. Now I don’t particularly like this move for day-to-day business, but in the circumstances of a holiday weekend it seemed to make a lot of sense.
If I get to the point where I’m doing all of this full time and I want to leave the country for a week or more, then sure, I’ll either hire someone to manage my stuff OR I’ll put the vacation settings in place. Until then, I think it’s pretty safe to assume that your buyers won’t be particularly flustered by a small vacation delay. Just do your best to communicate and handle their needs while you’re away and as soon as you get back.