In spite of the income and, yes, the fun, you'll have times when you want to get away from eBay. How do you leave your business?

   Fortunately, you can always time auctions around your vacations. It you're going to be gone 5 or 6 days, don't start your auctions to end during the time you'll be gone. Even if you don't list auctions that end during your absence, you still need to be available for questions about the auctions that will end once your return home.

   Of course, you might opt to get away from eBay completely and not list at all while you're out of town. That is sometimes useful but also difficult too because of the income loss. If you have buyers who routinely buy from you, you don't want them to think that you're absence means you no longer sell. We always like to keep some auctions going for that very reason; our repeat buyers know we haven't stopped selling.

   Repeat buyers are vital to your eBay business. At the time of this writing, our primary eBay ID, BidMentor, has almost 6,000 feedbacks but of those only a few more than 4,000 are from unique buyers. That means that far more than 20% of our sales come from repeat buyers. This is especially telling given that we don't sell staple items or the same goods over and over. Almost every item we sell is unique from all other items we've sold.

   Just because you aren't listing anything due to vacation doesn't mean the questions from buyers will stop. If someone bought something from you before your vacation and hasn't received it in a timely manner, that buyer will want to know if you shipped the item. That is the kind of question you really need to respond to quickly before the buyer gives you negative feedback. Therefore, it's difficult to get away completely. While you travel, always take a laptop or be able to check your email and messages online in an Internet café or at your hotel to be sure that you are able to respond within 24 hours or so of any question.

eBay Stores Make Vacationing Simpler

   An eBay store is an area of eBay you can set up, for an extra monthly fee, where all of your items are showcased. It works a lot like your own Web site and only your items appear in the listing.

   One advantage of an eBay store is that you can indicate vacation time in your store's preference settings and eBay puts your store on hold for that time. All auctions are held until your stated return date at which time eBay will start up the store listings once again. Your sellers will be told that it's only due to your vacation that the store is temporarily on hold until your return.

Schedule Listings to Start Near Your Vacation's End

   For an added fee, 10-cents as of the time I write this, eBay allows you to create a scheduled listing. That is where you go through the normal motions of listing an item for sale but the auction doesn't actually start until a specific date and time that you set at the time you list the item.

   We use this feature to post several auctions that begin about 2 days before we're scheduled to return home. That way, we don't get home to a huge batch of auctions to handle that are over about the time we get there. In addition, it means that the auctions we did list have had time to generate a few bids and interest. That way we hit the ground running when we get home.

   As a syndicated newspaper columnist about eBay, as well as a trainer on using Direct Marketing techniques to boost eBay sales, I run into lots of eBayers who want to know how they can combine being away on vacation with their auctions. They hate to see all their sales dwindle the week they are gone. Fortunately, they don't have to.