Alright, you’ve decided it’s high time for a vacation, but before you can kick back and sip piña coladas on the beach, there are a few steps you need to complete to ensure your Amazon business runs like a well-oiled machine in your absence.

Consider this your pre-vacation Amazon seller checklist: three essential tasks you absolutely must tend to first if you want your online empire to keep chugging along while you’re off the grid.

Step 1: Fulfill All Pending Orders

First things first, you need to make sure there are no outstanding orders waiting to be processed. Go through your queue and fulfill every single one before you make any changes to your listings. Trust me, you don’t want to be dealing with angry customers while you’re trying to relax.

Step 2: Automate Your Customer Communications

As an Amazon seller, you’re required to respond to customer inquiries. Ignoring these can hurt your seller metrics. The key is to provide a timely response that keeps customers informed and satisfied. Using messaging templates would be a great way to automate this process and save some time. You can predefine most common issues you have encountered before and save it as a template message. It will probably cover more than 80% of the issues you may need to resolve. 

Step 3: Deactivate Your Listings

Next up, it’s time to switch your listings to “inactive” status. This will prevent new orders from coming in while you’re away. However, you’ll want to give yourself a 2-day buffer period to do this.

Amazon requires you to fulfill all pending orders before activating vacation mode. If you deactivate your listings less than 48 hours before your trip, you risk getting last-minute orders that you’ll be obligated to ship out. On the flip side, if you do it too early, you could miss out on potential sales.