Let’s take a vacation! Here’s my strategy for a stress-free break from your online shop (without sacrificing sales!)

Hope I’m finding you someplace cool during this global heatwave, maybe in a dark room, shades drawn, working on listings with an ice cold drink and Netflix on in the background (are you still a subscriber??) I wish that’s what I was doing but instead I’m on a little family camping vacation sweating my bum off – don’t worry, we had enough smarts to book a cabin with A/C for this trip but for the next one in August, we’re tenting it (by the ocean but still. eeeeek)

Since I’m basically OOTO for a few days, today I’m going to share my strategy for my Etsy shop leading up to and while I’m on vacay. Maybe it'll encourage you to take a REAL break! It’s hard to do, I know it all too well (our first stop into the road trip was Savers Thrift LOL). This job is so much fun that it’s common for us to have a #nodaysoff mentality.

Here’s my plan:

First off, since I’m a psycho about being consistent with adding new listings to my Etsy shop, there is no way I’m going to go a few days without adding freshies and I have a plan to make it happen. Throughout the week, I took a ton of product photos and videos, gave them a quick edit and uploaded to drafts. I wanted to do this on Wifi while I was home, it’s faster and doesn’t eat up data while I'm on the go. I then recorded measurements and weights, but only where I couldn’t make an educated guess. I live on the edge and get it right *most* of the time. :)

When I have a few mins here and there before bed or while I'm laying awake in the middle of the night wondering what bugs are crawling all over me (does anyone actually sleep on camping trips?), I can knock out a few new listings and feed the Etsy beast. I could have also prepped complete drafts and then dripped them out one day at a time if I didn't feel like even opening the Etsy app while I'm away.

The second thing I did was I extend my processing times from 1-2 days to 3-5 a few days before we left just to be on the safe side. They are now back to my normal range since I’ll be able to ship again on Monday.

This is super obvious - I made sure that all my orders from the week so far were shipped out on time.

Optional: I didn’t do it but if you are hardcore about taking a complete break or know you'll have a spotty internet connection, you can set up auto reply for your Etsy messages so that you don’t have to worry about responding within 24 hours. You can set it for up to 5 days at a time. I’m not turning on autoreply but even if I did, I’d still try to get back to customers as soon as possible because it could be the difference between converting and losing a sale!

Now that I’ve proven that you can go on vacation without sacrificing your sales potential, what’s stopping you from stepping away for a few days? What about a full week? Staycations count!

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