Handling time

[Markclem]

Hi Everyone, I am going on Vacation next Wednesday I will be back Sunday I would like to leave my store open . I know I can change my handling time . Do you put your store on Vacation or just change your handling time? I plan on messaging each buyer letting them know I will not ship till Monday

[Jay]

If you change your handling time, there’s no need to put the store on vacation.

[MDC Galleries & Fine Art]

Just as Jay says. If you use business policies, just go there and edit each of your shipping profiles. We only use 4 or so. Open each of those and scroll down and you will see “Handling Time”. Just click on the number of days you will be gone and save the edit.

That’s all there is to it. If you sell a lot give yourself a day or two buffer to get everything done when you get back. When we go away for our 10 day trips to Florida, we use 15 day handling time. When we reach the 6-7 day time left on our trip, we re-edit the business policies and change it to 10 days and leave it at that. As you state, just have a cut and paste blurb ready and when something sells just shoot an email or text to the buyer reminding them, in case they didnt see it, about your extended handling time.

Only had 2 or 3 buyers request a cancellation due to not being able to wait for our return.

Same technique most SL members use and it has been documented numerous times here on the old Blog and new Forum.

Good luck…

mike at MDC Galleries and Fine Art

[sonia]

I put the store on vacation AND change the handling time. That way there is a message that the customer sees on the top of the page when they are considering buying the item. Then there is no need to message them about longer handling time after they make the purchse.

[MDC Galleries & Fine Art]

I belive, and others will chime in if I am wrong, but the use of the Vacation mode, will over ride your other setings [even extended handling times] and still apply your regular business policies as a default. And using Vacation mode with out hiding your store items will result in Sales that show the default shipping times instead of the extended times.
Use of the Vacation mode also means your items will be re-indxed and you will loose any watchers, your ranking and your visit-hits count will re-set. But I am unsure of this because it has been so long since we have used the Vacation Mode. After joining the SL group years ago and reading all about the benefits of extended handling times vs. Vacation Mode I believe most SL members use ONLY the extended times for the most part.

I would suggest you hit the Ebay forums and refresh what the down side is of using the Vacation mode. I think that with it turned on and you dont honor the original ship times you may still be subject to some penalties / defect ratings.

But as I said, am now not certain, but worth checking it out and you may not be able to undo it anyway. Just talking out loud.

[Jay]

Agreed. If you change handling time, you don’t need to do anything else because the buyer will see the shipping time when they purchase. eBay will back you up every time if a buyer complains about an item not being shipped delivered before the stated handling time.

Adding Vacation mode just confuses the issue IMHO. Some sellers like the extra banner. That’s cool but not necessary.

If we’re gone for more than a week, we will send a message to each buyer as a courtesy. Also it just heads off any confusion.

[sonia]

Jay,
Look, you guys like to do it differently than I do – that’s cool. But what I do works for me. I don’t lose any watchers, I get sales, and I don’t have to be bothered sending messages to buyers. Sending those messages is cool for you, but unnecessary as far as I’m concerned – as you say, they see the handling time when they buy the item. I actually think having vacation mode ON reduces confusion. So let’s just agree to disagree and allow others to weigh the pros and cons of both approaches and decide what works best for them.

MDC,
Thanks for the heads up re: possible problems with my approach. I haven’t seen any issues so far, but I will keep an eye out. Just in case you missed it, I don’t just put in vacation mode ONLY. I also extend the handling time.

[Jay]

You mad?

[T-Satt]

For us, we are similar to Sonia. We extend the Handling time, and we use the Vacation Mode to alert buyers that shipping will be later than normal. In addition, we also have a template message that we keep on our phones that states that we are out of town, the date we will return, and the date items will ship out. When we get a sale, we copy and paste that message to the buyer.

We feel that the handling time covers us with eBay and does show (a little) on when the item will arrive. We like the banner on the items and the message to make sure that there is no confusion with the buyer.

Works for us, we communicate a lot, and we have only had 1 or 2 cancellations. Plus, now that we schedule listings, we still show activity, so our sales stay active.

[sonia]

Oh, I am definitely mad (british definition), but not angry 🙂

[Author]

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