How “Vacation Mode” Affected My Etsy Shop (Stats Included) and What I Do Instead

There’s an age-old question around the Etsy world asked by many of us who are balancing the demands of work, family life, and so many other things:

“If I need to take a break, or I’m going on vacation, should I use vacation mode in my Etsy shop?”

Etsy sellers have debated this since I started on Etsy in 2012, with a lot of sellers saying that using vacation mode has no impact on the future sales of their business, and then another whole group of sellers saying that they used vacation mode and they saw a long-lasting and very dramatic impact on their sales in the shop.

I think that either one of these scenarios can be true when you use vacation mode, and a lot of it depends on where you are in the process of building your shop and how consistent your sales are before you go on vacation mode, and then also what you consider to be “good” or consistent sales.

How long you go on vacation mode and what the scenario is surrounding it can have an impact on your results after you come back from vacation mode. If you’re only leaving for a few days or a week for vacation, it’s different than taking a year off of your business and having massive changes take place on the platform during your time away.

Formally Etsy has said that vacation mode does not impact your shop or the way that your shop is ranked, however, in the time that you are on Etsy vacation mode, your shop is not gaining traction in its relevance and quality score. Ultimately, this can actually have a big impact on your shop because other shops in your niche that sell similar things are gaining a sales history and increasing their quality score. So it’s not necessarily that your shop goes down it’s that other shops go up and therefore yours is lower in comparison.

From my own experience with a shop that gets steady and consistent sales, vacation mode had a long-lasting and dramatic impact on the number of sales that I had, though it did eventually recover.