Vacation mode has a bad reputation that it really doesn’t deserve. There are a lot of people who say to never put your shop on vacation because it will ruin your shop, but that’s absolutely not true.
There are ways to come back from vacation mode, and if you do the things that you need to do, your shop will recover from being closed just fine.
Table of Contents
- How to come back from Etsy vacation mode.
- Newer shop with a shorter vacation time.
- Newer shop with a longer vacation time.
- Older shop with a shorter vacation time.
- Older shop with a longer vacation time.
How to come back from Etsy vacation mode.
When you return from vacation mode, you should take steps to restart activity in your shop. This means activity on your listings, not activity like editing and posting shop updates. The recent activity portion of the Etsy search placement algorithm is paused during vacation mode, and that lack of information will make it difficult for Etsy to determine where listings should appear in organic search results.
By increasing activity on your listings, you will restart the recent activity and help Etsy to determine search placement for your listings.
How to do this effectively will depend on a few factors. The first is how old your shop is and how many sales it has.
Shops that have a lot of sales won’t take as long to rebound from vacation because Etsy already has a lot of information about its listings, and knows where the listings should be in search results.
Newer shops without as much of a sales history don’t have as much information in the Etsy system, so they will probably have to work harder to get back into the swing of things.
Another factor to consider is how long the shop has been on vacation. For closures that last longer than a week, it will probably take longer to rebound from vacation than for shorter time periods.
There are ways to manage vacation mode for longer time frames, like using a combination of extended processing times and a shorter time period where the shop is on vacation, but every method has a downside.
It’s important to consider both of the factors before you decide how to handle your vacation.
The following suggestions for returning from vacation mode are based on the age of the shop/sales history, plus the length of vacation mode being active.
Newer shop with a shorter vacation time.
If your shop is on the newer side, or you don’t have many sales, Etsy might not have a lot of information about your listings’ placement in search. This could mean that it will take longer to get activity going in your shop again. The more aggressive you are about driving traffic to your shop the better. More traffic will increase the activity in your shop, and that’s what Etsy needs in order to know where to rank your listings in search.
You may want to just extend your processing times if you’re only going to be away for less than a week, depending on what your customers expect. If that’s not possible, the full list of things that you should be doing are:
- See if you get sales soon after opening…If you do, then you might not need to worry, just watch your stats and see if your traffic is rebounding.
- Run Etsy ads at a budget that will get you a good amount of traffic per day (don’t limit it to $1 a day for this purpose.)
- Run a sale in your shop.
- Send out a newsletter to your mailing list to tell them that you’re back and offer a special discount for shopping.
- Add new listings and renewing listings that have expired while you were gone.
- Promote on social media and being aggressive about it. Post 2-3 times a day for a few days if necessary.
- Monitoring traffic to your shop and not letting up until it’s back to normal!
If your shop is young and you don’t have many sales, your job when you come back from vacation will be to promote like crazy until your sales are back to where they should normally be.
You can’t sit back and expect Etsy to find your listings organically, you need to be proactive about driving your own traffic.
Newer shop with a longer vacation time.
If your shop is newer and you’re going to be away for longer than a week, you might not want to be closed for that long. I would close for the first part of my vacation, then a couple of days before coming back I would reopen with a longer processing time so that my shop wasn’t completely shut for as long. You may want to try a hybrid approach like that to minimize the time that your shop will be dormant.
If that’s not possible, you should do the same thing as the previous section:
- See if you get sales soon after opening…If you do, then you might not need to worry, just watch your stats and see if your traffic is rebounding.
- Run Etsy ads at a budget that will get you a good amount of traffic per day (don’t limit it to $1 a day for this purpose.)
- Run a sale in your shop.
- Send out a newsletter to your mailing list to tell them that you’re back and offer a special discount for shopping.
- Add new listings and renewing listings that have expired while you were gone.
- Promote on social media and being aggressive about it. Post 2-3 times a day for a few days if necessary.
- Monitoring traffic to your shop and not letting up until it’s back to normal!
Older shop with a shorter vacation time.
If your shop is fairly established and you get regular sales, you may not need to worry too much about the effects of a short vacation. If Etsy has a good amount of information about your listings it might not take long to get things back up and running.
I turn my shop off on a regular basis to slow down sales, and it doesn’t affect my sales when I return at all. I just turned my shop off for a 5-day vacation, and I had sales within an hour of turning it back on.
I have over 40,000 sales at the time I did that, though, so Etsy is very aware of where they think my listings should be.
In fact, I saw that my listings were showing up on the first page of search after ten minutes of when the shop was reactivated.
If your shop is well-established, you might not need to do anything after a vacation shutdown that’s on the shorter side. What I would do is this:
- Watch your sales…If you have sales come in soon after reopening, you might not have to do anything else.
- If your sales seem slow, you can run Etsy ads to gain some visibility. Advertise best selling listings so that you can bolster their presence in search results.
- Run a short sale to get traffic back to your shop.
- Relist things that had expired when you were gone.
- Do basic social media promotion and send out a newsletter to your email list.
Older shop with a longer vacation time.
For an older shop that has a good sales history, you might want to use the hybrid vacation mode/extended processing time with a shop opening date a few days before the vacation ends arrangement for longer breaks. That will let you take a longer time off but will still minimize the time that the shop is totally shut.
When you return from vacation mode, you should see if you start to get sales right away, and if you do, you may not need to do anything else. If not, try the following:
- Run Etsy ads to get your listings seen.
- Send out a newsletter to your email list.
- Promote on social media.
- Run a sale on Etsy.
- Relist items that had expired while you were gone.
When you’re returning from a long vacation, you’ll basically have to make more of an effort to get the activity on your listings going again.
However, if your shop had regular sales before you went on vacation, that will help your listings in search when you return.
Keep an eye on your stats, and if your visits and views come back fairly quickly, you may not need to do much to rebound from being closed.
Regardless of what your specific situation is, be prepared to spend the week that you return from vacation trying to get your traffic up and running.
If you’re in the mindset of knowing that’s what you’ll be working on, it will just be a nice surprise if it turns out that your sales return right away.
When I turned my shop on after my 5-day vacation, I had a sale within an hour, and 13 by the end of the day.
I didn’t have to do anything other than turn my shop on to get back to normal, but I was ready to run a sale and run ads if I had to. Expect to have to make an effort with it and you won’t be surprised!
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