Why I'll NEVER Put My eBay Store on Vacation Mode [Except This Times]

so I've decided to put my dropshipping stores on vacation mode while I'm on vacation this is the first time I'm ever doing this so I kind of want to explain not only how to do this but also why I've decided to do this for the first time so if you guys are not familiar

with who I am my name is Paul J Lipsky I've been running ecommerce businesses for over two and a half years I currently have three dropshipping businesses two of them are on eBay one is about 99% automated the other one's about 90% automated and I'll explain later why that's not more automated and then I have an amazon drop shipping business that's also about 99 percent automated so in the past when I've gone on vacation I've always left my stores up and running and that's always been great for me because it allowed me to vacation while still making money and this was always kind of fun for me I would come back from vacation and say and be able to see okay how much money did I spend on vacation and end up making from my drop shipping business usually it would always at least offset the cost sometimes I would actually make more money drop shipping than I spent on the vacation not to mention the fact when we're drop shipping we're using a lot of credit cards building up a lot of points so usually travel ended up being for free anyway now this has always worked out in the past because my focus has always been to make my stores as automated as possible but the thing is you can only automate so much in my opinion because with this business there's a lot of finances involved so there's some things that I simply don't trust my virtual assistants with so for instance I'm not going to give my virtual assistants the ones who run my eBay and Amazon stores I'm not going to give them my credit card information and I'm definitely not going to give them the login information for my bank accounts and yet despite that every single I would say every other day I have to log into bank accounts and pay off my credit cards because like I said this is a high-volume business we're putting a lot of money on those cards every single day and I'll max it out on a weekly basis if I don't pay off the cards at least every other day in addition to that I use a lot of discounted gift cards with my business and these discounted gift cards I have to buy them on a daily basis and that's something else I also don't trust my virtual assistants with because that does involve my money my finances I'll give them the gift cards to use but the actual purchasing of them that's still my responsibility now in total these tasks take only a few minutes a day spend maybe 20 minutes a day doing these tasks but it's something that I haven't been able to outsource because it is really more of a sensitive area but I think you guys get the point in

addition to that like I mentioned before one of my eBay stores is only about 90 percent automated at this point and that's because just a couple of weeks ago one of my virtual assistants reached out to me telling me she had some health issues so she had to cut back on her hours now I thought she would get better quicker so I didn't give those responsibilities her job to other virtual assistants I just said hey I'll just do it for a week or two until she's better and then she could start doing it again so I don't have to train someone knew how to do it if they're not gonna end up doing it after two weeks as it turns out though she's sicker than she thought so I'm still doing those tasks now and I'm kind of at the point now where I'm about to go away on vacation and I don't want to train a virtual assistant now in case something goes wrong in case she's not fully trained by the time I go away now all those are not excuses to put my store on vacation mode those are roadblocks that I could overcome and I've overcome them in the past there have been times that I've spent five days completely away from my business I was we on a sailboat out in the Atlantic Ocean five days without any internet my business is still ran without me my virtual assistants did fine and I made money on vacation but things are a little bit different this time

this vacation is completely jam-packed we have things planned from sunrise to sunset every single day and I'm afraid I won't even have the 15 to 20 minutes that are necessary every day for me to keep my stores up and running now again there are ways around this I could buy a bunch of gift cards upfront I could pay my credit cards off over pay them going into it but because this is 11 days that's a long time that's a lot of gift cards I would have to buy upfront and potentially put a lot of money on my card a prepay the card so a little bit of a unique situation but what really makes this trip unique is where we are going so we are going to the Galapagos Islands these are a set of islands off of Ecuador it's known for its biodiversity if you guys know who Charles Darwin is this is where he developed his theory of evolution there's it's right on the equator but it's the only place outside of the arctic's where there's penguins stairs Juana's there's huge tortoises it's just amazing biodiversity hammerhead sharks that were going to be hopefully diving with so again like I said jam-packed vacation but also it's kind of isolated and from what I read the internet there is really slow so here's my plan did it wait a minute I'm in the process

of editing this video right now and I'm listening to myself talk and I gotta say I don't like what I hear because what I hear is I'm making excuses I've designed my dropshipping stores to be automated that was my intention all along and I've gotten to the point now where every time I start a new dropshipping store my primary goal is how quickly can I hand this off to a virtual assistant so for me to now come in and say well I don't know if it's going to work while I'm away on vacation even though it's worked every day when I haven't been on vacation and even though that says something about my leadership and about the virtual assistants who I trust every other day of the year you know I can't continue I can't make those excuses like that so I've given this a lot of thought since I originally record this video and especially on listening back on it I've been working on this for hours just because I keep stopping and sitting down and thinking am I making the right choice here this is actually even makes sense and I don't think it does because my virtual assistants are more than capable I just chat with them I said hey guys I'm gonna be away for 11 days and they said Paul we can do this like manage your stores in the past while you were away and you can trust us to do this we believe that we can do this and you know what they're right they can do this so I put together a plan now what I'm going to do is from my Amazon store I'm going to leave that up and running but raise the prices of my items I have a credit card with a pretty high limit so I shouldn't hit the limit but just in case I'm going to raise the prices of my Amazon items just a little bit and then on my eBay store that's mostly automated I'm like 99% automated I'm going to buy a whole bunch of gift cards upfront for Home Depot that's the primary source I use for that eBay store gave all those gift cards to my virtual assistants and then they can use those as the week goes on again I will slightly raise the price of the items in that store as well for the third for the second eBay store my third account that one I actually will put on vacation mode mostly as a test because I've never done it before and I am curious to see what would happen if it does go on vacation mode so that's the new plan but the rest of the video is still relevant so let's keep watching the rest of it so

that's the plan and guys if you want to follow along I'll make another video after the trip probably about a month after the trip and showing you guys what happened when I put my store on vacation mode did the sales like my momentum slow down even when I turn my store back on did I just pick up where I left off I'll go over all that inside that video so if you don't want to miss the out on that video make sure to subscribe to the channel by clicking it down below and also make sure to follow me on instagram my handle is just Paul Jay Lipsky so you can search for me on Instagram because if I do have some internet connection I will be posting up some pictures of all the animals I see all the diving photos I'll put them up on Instagram for you guys to check them out there now

while I'm away I do have other businesses of course like this YouTube channel for instance and I do coaching of students teaching them how to do drop shipping now luckily with the coaching I've been coaching people for a long time now so I've noticed pattern it's the same questions that people ask over and over again where that different anytime I see a question like that or a problem like that I make a video about it and put it inside my courses or I modify one of the videos inside the course to keep up with these common problems that I see people having so at this point the questions that I get ninety nine point ninety nine percent of them are answered inside my courses so those will continue to provide the value to the students whoever it ends up signing up and I guarantee the questions that people have will be answered in the videos in the course if they just watch them all now as for YouTube I've already recorded a bunch of videos just like this one and these will be scheduled to upload while I'm away so you guys won't see any interruption in YouTube videos and so you guys can continue to get some value from this YouTube let me show you real

fast how to put your stores on vacation mode if you decide to do that so I'll show you eBay first it's a little bit strange you got to come over to eBay and on the top right hover over my eBay and click on messages actually and then on this page click on the top right where it says change settings once on the next page you want to scroll down until you see where it says vacation settings and turn on and it gives you some more options you can create a message for people to see when they visit your store I'm just going to leave that blank and then you have some more options so when people visit your listings it's going to say this seller is currently away if you make a purchase there may be a delay in processing your order but what I'm actually going to click is this keep people from buying your fixed price listings while you're on vacation and then I'll just click apply with Amazon what I did was I came over logged in to my seller central hovered over the top right where it says settings and clicked on account info that brings me to this page and right here on the left there is a vacation setting right here so as you can see I've already have it activated actually says inactive next to status of listings so all you do is click on going on a vacation this page you can either make your listings active or inactive so for amazon. com which is the only one I sell on right now I chose inactive and clicked save now with both of these you have to keep in mind especially with Amazon you still need to respond to customer questions so my virtual assistants are still going to come in and respond to questions and any orders that were placed before you went on vacation mode you still need to fulfill those and upload tracking numbers so just be aware of both of those things before you enter vacation mode and if

you guys did get value out of this video and you want me to make a follow-up video make sure to give the video a thumbs up and let me know in the comment section down below let me know if you want me to make a follow-up video like that and if I get enough people who are interested in it and give the video a thumbs up then I'll make it that makes that lets me know that you guys are enjoying this video and want to learn more about putting stores on vacation otherwise guys thanks so much for watching and I'll see you want to get back bye for now