Merchant Question: Vacation All I Ever Wanted, Vacation Had to Get Away

June 23, 2006 | In General, Merchant Questions |

I recently received the following question from a merchant:

I run a Yahoo store that is still small enough to be in my home. I anticipate taking it into a real office space and hiring employees within 2 years. On average, [I receive] about 12 orders per day.

In the past our store when we went on vacation we put a vacation notice on our store, stating that “we are away, but the orders will be filled and shipped on xyz date” (3 or 4 days after we returned from vacation).

But now our store is really starting to take off, and with our increasing number of orders, we’re not sure what to do! If we close the store outright for the 10 days we’re away, we’re afraid it will hurt our business and our reputation. If we put up the usual vacation notice, we’re afraid we’ll be buried in orders when we return from vacation! We don’t have anybody who can take over our business while we’re away (it is complicated by the fact that it is in our house — and the huge learning curve to train somebody in all of our products and procedures).

What should we do during this successful but stressful growth period? What do other people with fledgling businesses do?

Good question with many implications regardless of how you approach the problem. The good news is it is better to have the problem of too many orders than not enough. The bad news is more orders means you need to be cautious in how you handle longer order fulfillment times—instead of angering a few, you could have a mob spreading bad word of mouth. So how do you approach the problem?

Vacation Tactics:

Our merchant mentioned a few approaches and I’ll add a third:

  • Stop taking orders
  • Take orders but notify of longer order fulfillment times
  • Hire a part-time temporary employee

Let’s do a quick run down of these:

  • Stop taking orders: As the merchant feared, not taking orders while on vacation sends one signal—we are a small operation and we close for vacation rather than take orders. Maybe that is a message you want to send if you only want your store to stay small with a limited customer base. If you want to project the image of a larger store where customers come first, think twice before taking this approach.
  • Take orders but warn of longer order delivery times: This is only an option if you are taking short vacations. While online shoppers do factor in a longer delivery time in their purchase decision (rather than buying local if possible), the popularity of overnight and second day shipping options indicates that customers often times want things right away. Be very careful how you message such a delay if you chose this approach. At a minimum set the Availability field for products to a longer time and add a note to your checkout pages informing customers of the delay in filling the order. Failure to warn customers could lead to chargebacks if you collect funds well before shipping or could lead customers to give bad reviews or word of mouth about your store. Set auto-responders for email addresses customers may use and change the message for your business answering machine to inform customers of the delay. If you can check email while away to answer any angry customers, you may head off any problems.
  • Hire a part-time employee: Obviously this option is the most involved. It is also complicated by our merchant running the business out of the home. You wouldn’t hire an unknown person and entrust them with your business and your home too. Eventually though, your business may outgrow your ability to fill orders. Consider hiring a trustworthy family member, neighbor, or friend to fill in while on vacation. A recently retired person, stay-at-home mom with school age children, or a college student on summer vacation may be excited at the chance to do some short-term part-time work. The only caution against hiring family or friends is if they cannot perform, you have to be able to let them go in a way that hopefully won’t damage your long-term relationship. Pitch it to them as very short-term fill in work. If they are able to do the work, you can always ask them again. If you are worried about providing access to your home, see if you can move your products, shipping materials, and computer into a garage or other out-building while away.

Don’t Arrest Your Business Getting Rest

If you are facing this problem in the short term, then the second option (take orders but warn customers) would seem to pose the least risk to your business. You can take orders and warn customers of the delay, leaving it up to them to complete the order and acknowledge the delayed arrival. Long term though, this strategy may hinder your growth.

Think about franchises. They grow because they not only have a solid business plan, but also have repeatable processes that can, with training, be performed by anyone. You should be able to train people to take over picking, packing, and shipping orders. You can also with more time train people to answer phones for product inquiries, review orders for fraud and process them, and even make updates to your store. Certainly some of these will take more training than others, but the point here is to start small, and start early. You get a chance to see if a part-time employee can do the tasks needed to run your store for a brief time without being gone—after all, you want to relax while away and not worry (full time) about your store.

More important, having a part-time worker, even a few hours a week, will allow you to forego the mundane tasks, and focus on more important aspects that only you are qualified to do—brainstorm, research, plan, and implement various strategies to increase traffic, increase conversion rates, increase order size, and really accelerate the growth of your business.

Paul Boisvert
Yahoo! Small Business

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  1. We too have had a similiar vacation situation. What we did is take the vacation at the end of the year, and about two months ahead of time, put some HTML in our footer section of our web pages (and near the header on the front page and checkout pages) that we would be closed from December 12th-17th for Inventory. Any orders placed during that time, would be processed when we re-opened on the 19th. This was in big bold red letters. We still took lots of orders and had a lot to fill when we came back, and only 1 person was upset because they didn’t “see” the notice. I looked at it as 2 steps forward and 1 step back, if the worst case scenario of several people got upset, but they didn’t.

    I also recently recevied a notification from one of our vendors recently, they they would be closing for their Annual Shutdown from July 3rd - 7th and would not be shipping or receiving orders during this time.

    I think whether you choose to take orders or not, most customers, new or regular, will understand, whether you are big or small - that all companies may shut down for a week for inventory, moving, re-tooling, holidays, or vacations.

    I hope this helps !!

    Comment by Pat — June 25, 2006 #

  2. Thanks for sharing Pat. I think your experience sums up the essence of the issue–communicate expectations to your buyers clearly. If the delay is acceptable, you will still get the order.

    Paul

    Comment by Administrator — June 26, 2006 #

  3. As a Yahoo! store, you have the option to post the number of days that items are expected to ship. I would add a note to the bottom of each page (in editor mode, go to variables). Most shoppers are happy to do business with small business. They just need to know how long you will be gone and about how long it should take for you to catch up with orders. Unless you want to stop the stream of income, personally I would leave your store open with the notices clearly posted. Perhaps even putting extra notice on the order pages AS WELL AS on the order confirmation emails will help. Customers very often miss notices on the website. If you give them 3 guaranteed opportunities to get this information about your vacation, they won’t be upset when packages are delayed. You want to build a repeat customer base and by preventing people from ordering from you while you are gone may prevent them from bothering next time. You know how if you go to a store and the posted hours are 9am to 5pm…and you arrive at 4:30pm and they are closed? How likely are you to come by again next time you need what they carry? If your customers trust you, they will wait…just make sure to give them notice!

    Comment by katie — June 28, 2006 #

  4. We are no longer “small” after six years, but we still suffer the pains when ever we even shut down for a holiday - especially bad when UPS shuts down like the day before Christmas and New Years. You can put notices in 42 point red type on every page and for some people it just doesn’t help because they can’t or don’t read. Communicate the best you can, be prepared to take a few lumps and take your laptop with you and work an hour or two a day to keep things moving. (yeah, I know it’s supposed to be vacation, but you got into a 24/7/365 business because you wanted to.) You can process your orders, mark them will ship in 4-7 days and update. Generally that is good enough for most customers. Just DON’T charge the card until you ship or you WILL get dumped on.

    Comment by Bill — June 29, 2006 #

  5. I have had a yahoo store for 5 years and I get 50 - 60 click throughs a day. I don’t know if they are just search egine submittion companies i have paid just clicking on my page to add stats but I get no orders at all. I need some help.. Who can I turn to to get all these click throughs turned into orders??? I have never got 12 orders per day.. I have not even received an order from my yahoo store in years.. Please help..

    Comment by Bryan Harrington — June 29, 2006 #

  6. Great advice Katie and Bill. Thanks for sharing your experiences in dealing with this issue.

    Paul

    Comment by Administrator — June 29, 2006 #

  7. I agree so much with Bill, I forgot to mention that you REALLY don’t want to charge cards until you ship. Your customers will not trust you, will call non-stop, and in many cases, never shop with you again if you take their money AND have delayed shipping.

    Another thought I had was to make sure and set up your email to send an automatic reply stating that you are on vacation and expect to be able to respond by “x” date. Give yourself enough wiggle room to have a couple of rough (read very very busy) days to catch up. Don’t promise that you will ship OR reply to emails too early. I like to UNDER promise and OVER deliver.

    Comment by katie — June 29, 2006 #

  8. Again good advice Katie. In fact there are legal considerations around when merchants need to ship goods after receiving an order. The FTC has the following document posted: MAIL OR TELEPHONE ORDER MERCHANDISE RULE. Note too that merchant banks and credit card processors may have even stricter rules for when goods must start the shipping process. Consult your agreements or call your merchant account provider for clarification.
    But back to your point Katie, the best way to avoid any issue with your merchant account provider is to communicate clear expectations with your buyers. Under promise and over deliver–pearls of wisdom there.

    P.S. Nice site–of course I am partial to stores with pirate decor.

    Paul

    Comment by Administrator — June 29, 2006 #

  9. Processes: Very good point. Your business should be able to run if any one single person disappears. To do this you need to have all of your business processes documented. And tested. Have someone come in from the outside and read your documentation and see if they can follow it and fill in your shoes. Also - Does your plan allow for growth and eventual fulfillment by a fulfillment house ?

    Charging / Katie: This one I disagree with. I charge people cards right away. 95% of the time the entire order process is not a problem. We know within hours if there will be any shipping problems. If there will be then we can easily refund the money. But it is less effort on our part if we automate the things that happen over and over the same way. If 9 out of 10 orders ship without a problem then I manage the exception, and automate the rule.

    In either case I want my business to be as automated as possible. I’ll handle the exceptions as they come up. But I want to automate the rules. This is better for me and my customer service.

    Patrick

    Comment by Patrick Allmond — November 20, 2006 #

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