Next Tuesday I have to take the day off to run kids to medical appointment, and my normal 3 employees are reduced to just a single person due to others being on vacation. I think I’d rather put the store on vacation so that there are no orders required to be shipped on 1/23 as the remaining person sometimes struggles to get stuff done on her own. Whats the best way to do this without hurting my account? Seems like every time I’ve put the store in vacation mode before, it takes WEEKS to regain sales momentum.
I could theoretically put my Order Limit Capacity at 1 order so that it immediately starts to push orders to a 2-day handling time LOL.
Download an inventory report
Open in Excel
Grab the data you need
Open an Inventory Upload template
Paste needed data
Change handling time to 3 days within Excel
Upload
I agree with your thought to extend handling time.
I have heard people say they encountered issues with their accounts coming off vacation mode, but I never have. I have had vacation mode on from a day to give me a long weekend to 2 weeks.
Recently I went on vacation for a month. When I went off vacation mode, orders came in again. Not super fast, but two days later I realized the handling was at 4 not normal. Uploaded that and I am fine.
Same. I use it for hours or days. It’s never “hurt”.
Any time you aren’t getting orders, you are slipping in sales rank, so maybe that’s what people mean? But if you put all listings to zero, and it stops sales, the same end result comes in.
but this is where you can’t have your cake and eat it. If you can’t fulfill orders, then changing handling time to 10 days will throttle them anyway (plus annoy customers who don’t pay attention).
Not making sales = not keeping sales rank
The only way to avoid it is to never stop selling, ie, never having a life!
You can say this about a lot of retail operations, and it’s probably the #2 reason people quit (#1 being that they failed to make money). Try owning a convenience store!
FBA’s actually a great solution here. Even if the products are otherwise lousy for FBA, sending in some FBA inventory to keep sales truckin when you’re on vacation (this is assuming you plan the vacation in advance) is a good way to avoid the sales rank hit. This obviously doesn’t help with an impromptu day off because an emergency came up, but if you’re planning a vacation in advance you can do the following:
Create another SKU for your best selling ASINs that you dont want to lose rank on
Estimate how many FBM sales you’d normally get for the time you’re going on vacation
Send double that number of units to FBA 2 - 4 weeks prior to your vacation
Change the FBA SKU to FBM (with 0 inventory, your regular FBM SKU will continue selling normally)
Change the FBA SKUs back to FBA the day before you leave
Put your store on vacation mode
When you come back, take vacation mode off and leave the FBA SKUs as is, Amazon will prioritize those offers automatically and unload the remainder of any FBA inventory and you’ll seamlessly receive FBM orders again once the FBA stock is sold out
I honestly felt like I was working just as hard. Packing up an FBA Order and getting it prepared takes time too. I am a one person show. FBM honestly keeps me busy for 40 hours a week. Add in FBA…and you actually add in overtime while not increasing the bottom line. I don’t feel like my sales increased overall, my work increased because it changed. Fill FBM orders each day and then prepare the FBA order. I have to package all those up myself as well.
BUT if you (or your store) normally does FBA – good point.
Let me add to my earlier post…next week I will be away from my inventory, M-F. So on Friday morning, I’ll upload 7 days. Next week on Tuesday, I’ll upload 4 days, and on Friday next week, I’ll upload Normal processing time. In this case, I kinda like Walmart better. Walmart makes you pick days off. So the processing time shortens as each day goes by. At Amazon, my spreadsheets have to do this.
So yes, I’ll travel with my laptop again…wish I could leave it at home and just use the app. But Walmart has no app…so laptop comes.
No surprise the ranking algorithms punished you severely for that. I’m not sure how exactly their algo calculates BSR, but the past week’s sales are very important for that. Even being yanked for a day or two has a noticeable impact.
Yesterday (Tuesday, 16Nov`24), we received an email notification with the Subject Line “Testing Sponsored Brands & Videos on Browse/Topic pages” (which of course smacks of a good bit of what I think of as “JET-lag” in following Amazon’s lead).
It’s difficult to argue with success, but I remain convinced that Bentonville is missing the boat.
I’m not, none of those things you mentioned would add to walmart’s bottom line if improved.
As far as a seller app goes, that’s really just for people’s convenience. Nobody’s going to say “I don’t want to make money because I don’t want to bring my laptop on vacation.” For Amazon I guess it was more important because all the RAs needed the app to go scan all the items in the clearance section.
I don’t know how reliable walmart’s platform is, but I think seller central would be better if they provided less features and focused more on making sure stuff actually works all the time. I would take sales data updating once a day and never having any issues vs amazon’s real time sales data which quite often stops tracking randomly or is randomly lagged.
The only thing that really matters is how many buyers they get to the platform. If the buyers come, the sellers will deal with whatever minor inconveniences there are.
