Etsy's vacation mode, on Shopify
Sellers who move from Etsy to Shopify ask the same question in their first month: where is the vacation mode? There isn't one. Here is what Etsy's mode does, what it costs you, and how to get the good part on Shopify without the bad part.
What Etsy's vacation mode does
One switch, a shop announcement and an auto-reply for messages. Your listings are hidden from search and your shop page shows the announcement. When you come back, you flip the switch and everything reappears.
What sellers learn the hard way is what happens in between: hidden listings stop ranking, and Etsy's search does not restore your position when you return. The forums are full of sellers describing weeks of lost visibility after a ten-day break. The mode protects you from orders you cannot fulfil, at the price of the traffic you spent months building.
Why Shopify doesn't have one
Shopify's answer, in its own help centre, is that you can either password-protect the store or move to the Pause and Build plan. The first makes your pages invisible to Google, like Etsy's mode. The second only takes effect at the end of your billing cycle and tells your visitors nothing.
Neither is a vacation mode in the sense an Etsy seller means: something you switch on the evening before you leave and off the morning you are back.
Getting the same thing, without losing your ranking
On Shopify the pieces are separate, and that turns out to be an advantage. The block can live at checkout, on Shopify's servers, so your product pages stay exactly where they are: visible, indexed, browsable. The message is a banner or a full-screen curtain with your reopening date, which visitors can add to their calendar. Nothing is hidden from Google, so there is nothing to recover when you return.
Pausify does exactly this, in fifteen languages, with one scheduled closure included for free. And if your products are not one-of-a-kind, it can keep taking orders while you are away and tell each customer when theirs will ship — something Etsy's mode never offered.