Overview

Amazon sellers who fulfill their own orders need to carefully manage their Seller Central holiday settings to avoid performance metric penalties during breaks. Amazon provides built-in tools for pausing FBM listings and overriding public holiday schedules, but a four-hour processing delay means changes must be planned well in advance. Getting these settings right can prevent late shipment rate spikes, cancellation issues, and potential account health warnings.

What's at Stake for FBM Sellers

• Order performance metrics — Unfulfilled orders during holidays count against your late shipment rate and cancellation rate
• Listing visibility — Holiday mode temporarily removes FBM listings from search results and product detail pages
• Delivery promises — Holiday setting changes directly affect the delivery dates shown to customers
• Account health — Repeated metric violations from unmanaged holiday periods can trigger warnings or suspensions

Sellers using Fulfillment by Amazon are largely unaffected since Amazon's warehouses continue operating, but anyone with merchant-fulfilled listings needs to take action before stepping away.

Activating Holiday Mode for Time Off

If you plan to stop processing orders during the holidays, holiday mode is your primary protection tool. When activated, it removes all your Fulfilled by Merchant listings from product detail pages and search results, preventing new orders from arriving while you're unable to ship them.

To activate it, navigate to the Listing Status and Holiday Settings page within Seller Central and toggle your account into holiday mode. This only affects merchant-fulfilled listings — any FBA listings will remain active and continue to be fulfilled by Amazon's warehouses, so you won't lose all sales visibility during your break.

The critical detail here is timing. Amazon states that holiday setting changes can take up to four hours to be reflected across the platform. If you're closing operations at 5 PM, you should activate holiday mode by 1 PM at the latest to prevent orders from slipping through during that processing window.

Overriding Public Holidays When You Plan to Work