Going on holiday? You can do a number of things with your eBay Shop and Shop Inventory items while you're away. Most importantly, you want to make sure your buyers don't have a negative shopping experience by buying items and unexpectedly waiting a long time to receive them.

There are three options and you can use one or all at the same time.

• Make your Shop Inventory listings unavailable

• Display a holiday message in your listings

• Display a holiday message in your Shop

To change these settings and turn them on:

Note: You will continue to be charged the normal fees (such as your Shop subscription fee and listing-related fees) while holiday settings are on.

If your holiday settings are on, they will remain in effect until you return to the holiday settings page..

Option 1: Make your Shop Inventory listings unavailable

What it does: Hides all of your Shop Inventory format items so that buyers do not see them in your Shop, in search results, in Cross-Promotions (other items are promoted in your listing), or on any other eBay pages. This can prevent buyers from having a negative shopping experience–in particular, buying items and waiting longer than usual to receive them from you. Thus this feature also lowers your risk of receiving negative feedback.

Other things to note about this option:

• Only your Shop Inventory format listings will be hidden. All Auction-style, regular Fixed Price, and any other eBay format listings will continue to appear to buyers as normal.

• Buyers who have already purchased items from these listings will still be able to view them.

• All other characteristics of your Shop Inventory listings will proceed normally, except they will be hidden from the view of buyers. For example, listings may expire if they aren't scheduled to be automatically renewed or relisted.

• Your Shop Inventory items will remain hidden until you return to the holiday settings page and turn this option off.

• While your listing pages will become hidden almost immediately, their titles may continue to appear in searches for several minutes and in categories for up to a few hours.

Option 2: Display a holiday message in your listings

What it does: Choosing this option will place a message above the item descriptions of all of your active listings, including Auction-style, regular Fixed Price, and Shop Inventory listings (if you have not chosen to hide them from buyers).

Note Due to eBay policy restrictions, you must use the standard holiday message provided. You'll need to select a date by which you expect to return. You can come back to the holiday settings page to change this date if needed.

Option 3: Display a holiday message in your Shop

What it does: Choosing this option will allow you to place a message on your Shop pages, informing buyers that you will be away on holiday. This message will appear below your custom header, if you have chosen to display one, without affecting any text you have saved in that area.

Note: You can use a default holiday message provided by eBay or create one of your own in either text or HTML format.