Overview

Amazon is reminding sellers that they can temporarily deactivate their seller-fulfilled listings using the platform's built-in vacation mode feature. This is particularly relevant as the holiday season approaches and many sellers plan to take time off, making it essential to avoid late shipments, order cancellations, and potential account health issues that can arise from unfulfilled orders.

What Is Vacation Mode?

Vacation mode is a Seller Central feature that allows merchants who handle their own shipping to temporarily remove their listings from Amazon's product detail pages and search results. When activated, your seller-fulfilled offers become invisible to shoppers, effectively pausing your sales activity without deleting your listings or losing any of your product data. This is different from simply reducing inventory to zero, as vacation mode cleanly suspends your entire seller-fulfilled catalog in one action and preserves all your listing information for when you return.

It is important to note that vacation mode only applies to seller-fulfilled (FBM) listings. If you also use Fulfillment by Amazon (FBA), those listings will remain active because Amazon's warehouses continue to handle storage, packing, and shipping on your behalf regardless of your personal availability. This distinction is critical for sellers who use a hybrid fulfillment strategy.

How to Activate Vacation Mode

To enable vacation mode, navigate to your Account Settings within Seller Central. From there, locate the Listing Status section under your account preferences. You will find an option to change the status of your listings from active to inactive. Once you toggle this setting, Amazon will remove your seller-fulfilled listings from product detail pages and search results within approximately one hour. The process is straightforward and does not require you to modify each listing individually, which saves considerable time for sellers with large catalogs.

Before activating vacation mode, make sure you have fulfilled or canceled any open orders. Leaving orders unfulfilled while switching to vacation mode can result in late shipment defects, negative feedback, and A-to-Z Guarantee claims, all of which can damage your account health metrics. It is a best practice to stop accepting new orders a day or two before you plan to go on vacation to ensure you have enough time to ship everything that has already been purchased.