Dear eBay Queen:

I’m not a huge seller, but I do sell 30 to 40 things a month.  I’ll be going out of town for spring break, and tried to figure out how to put my items on a “vacation setting. Is there a vacation setting for an eBay account so sales cannot occur on your account while unavailable?  I asked eBay this, and they told me that since I didn’t have a store, I couldn’t do it.  This really made me angry, so angry I sent the following email to eBay:

“I  just got off the phone with eBay Customer Service.  I needed to know how to put my listings on vacation over spring break.   I was told that I needed a store, but since I do not have a store (because it would not make financial sense to do so) but I have a problem not being able to set a vacation setting. I have 50 or more listings, and customer support told me if I didn’t have a store the only way for me to handle it was to delete all of my listing and then put them in one by one when I get back.

On Amazon I only have to click on one link for vacation and another link to come off vacation. None of the links are seen when on vacation. On e-bay it would cost me $15.95 per month to get the same service I get on Amazon for FREE. Makes me consider putting my listings on Amazon instead.”

Do you have any ideas on what I can do to put my stuff on vacation?  Or am I destined to take them all down and put them all back up?

Abby

Dear Abby:

I didn’t realize there wasn’t a vacation setting for people that didn’t have stores. http://pages.ebay.com/help/stores/contextual/vacation-settings.html  Way back in the day, I would put a little blurb in my listings that stated:  “I will be on vacation from March 18^th through the 23^rd.  I will be available by email, but if you pay for your items during that time they won’t be shipped until the 24^th.”

I’m really sorry this is happening to you.  I wish there was a quick fix for this. I do have one more solution that might help you, have you thought about using an all in one listing/selling program?  There are quite a few out there (some even free) that could help you out.  This way, you could take your listings down and put them up without the time of listing each individual one.  Here  you can view the different one’s here: http://cgi6.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?SolutionsDirectory&maingroup=0&page=results My favorite free listing program is Turbolister.

Dear eBay Queen:

After reading your column last week I thought I would call eBay and talked to one of their customer service agents about all of these restrictions.  That phone call was enlightening.

He told me the reason many/most sellers earn selling restrictions is because they don’t get enough feedback. Apparently, it’s the percentage feedback against the number of orders that triggers the eBay system to block sellers from listing further items or even attempting to change a listing.

This is the first time I’ve heard of this.  In the past it’s always been ‘wait and the system will tell you when you can list more items’, so, if I understand this correctly, eBay makes sellers responsible for the buyer leaving feedback. The assumption being, according to the agent, that if the buyer leaves no feedback, they must be unhappy. Laziness, apparently, doesn’t come into it. They obviously haven’t thought about restricting the buyer’s ability to purchase new items until they leave feedback for the ones they’ve already had.

I hope your reader,  “DS” reads this, and it helps him out.

J.E. Peters

Dear J.E.:

I will forward this information to him.  It makes perfect eBay sense that eBay would monitor how much feedback a seller is receiving in comparison to what they are selling. I don’t agree with this logic, but I get why they are doing it.

Thank you for sharing your conversation and insight on this program.

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Suzie Eads is a nationally known eBay marketer and eBay trained Education Specialist. She lives in Rantoul, Kansas.