Pausing your shop without deleting anything, and what buyers see while you are away.
Shop Vacation Mode pauses the buying while you are away and cannot ship. It is one switch and two short messages, and it is designed so that nothing you have built disappears while you use it.
Your shop and every item you have listed stay visible, stay searchable and stay exactly where they were. Nothing is unpublished, hidden or removed, and your place in search results is not given up.
What stops is buying. On your items, Buy, Add to Cart and Make an Offer are disabled, and the Buy button itself changes to read On vacation. In listings, your cards carry a small On vacation badge.
Ask Seller stays on. Buyers can write to you, and you can answer, throughout — that is deliberate. Someone who cannot buy today can still ask whether you will have another one in September.
Both are optional, both are plain text, and both hold up to 2,000 characters with a counter underneath.
The friendly wording you can see in the empty boxes is a suggestion, not a default. It is grey placeholder text. If you leave the Announcement blank, what buyers actually read is the flat line "This seller is away and is not accepting orders right now." — so if you want to say when you are back, type it in.
Neither message is translated. A buyer reading Artmire in another language sees them in the language you typed them, so keep them short and plain if you sell abroad.
It is a notice, not a message. It appears at the foot of the conversation for the buyer, marked Automatic reply from your shop, the moment they open the thread — before they have written anything.
So it is a courtesy, not an answer. Messages you receive while away still need replying to when you are back — nothing has been said on your behalf that closes the conversation.
Carts are not emptied. Anything sitting in a buyer's cart is still there when you come back, and they may check out the moment you do — at whatever price is listed then.
Offers keep moving. Vacation mode does not pause a negotiation. An offer can still be accepted while you are away — by you, or by a buyer accepting your counter — and that creates an order the buyer then cannot pay for until you are back. If you are away for long, it is worth answering or letting your open offers lapse before you switch it on.
A sale badge is replaced, not added to. While you are away the On vacation badge takes the corner of your item cards, which is where a discount percentage would otherwise sit. If you are away during a sale, buyers will not see the discount flagged on the card, only on the item page.
Flip the switch to Off and press Save Changes. Everything returns at once — the buttons, the badges, the cart groups, the notice in chat — and buyers can buy again immediately.
Your two messages stay saved for next time. There is no need to write them again, and there is nothing to undo: the only thing that changed was the switch.
If you had to leave without switching it on, write to us and we can turn it on for you.
It is for a fixed absence — a holiday, a fair, a fortnight when nothing can be posted. It is the honest alternative to leaving items buyable and shipping late, which costs you a review you cannot remove.
If you are stopping for good, or for a stretch long enough that your listings would go stale, unpublishing the items themselves is the better tool.
Why an item may not be visible