Many experienced sellers have made the same mistake: Assuming that their handling time would implicitly be extended to match the duration of their vacation. We see posts about this on the discussion board every day. Unfortunately, the basic vacation setting is nothing more than an "Away" message.
Apparently the customer support staff are no better-informed than eBay's basic Help page about vacation settings. Or perhaps they are relying on that as their main source of information, so they make the same mistaken inference about handling time as so many sellers do.
The vacation settings and the Help page about them (and apparently also the customer support training) were set up long before eBay started using shipping time as a seller evaluation measure. Just a simple one-sentence update in the Help page would save a lot of aggravation and disappointment for Store subscribers who are doing their best to be conscientious sellers.
brian_burke@ebay
