Vendor holiday mode for Dokan marketplaces

Shop open

Seller on holiday

What holiday mode does

Sellers on a marketplace are usually one person. They go on holiday, they get ill, they run out of stock, they have a week where life is simply too busy to get to the post office. When that happens they need a way to stop taking orders that does not involve dismantling their shop.

Holiday mode is that switch. While it is on, every listing that seller owns is hidden from the shop, from category pages, from search results, from product rails and from their own store page, and cannot be added to a basket or bought. While it is off, nothing at all is different.

Why it matters more than it sounds

A marketplace's reputation is made of its worst orders, not its average ones. An order that sits unposted for two weeks because the seller was away produces an angry buyer, a refund, probably a bad review, and quite often a buyer who never comes back — and none of that is really the seller's fault if you never gave them a way to say “not this week”.

Without a pause switch, sellers improvise. They unpublish their products one by one, or set every item out of stock, or just let the orders pile up and deal with the consequences. The first two are miserable to undo, and the third costs you customers.

On Dokan, vendor vacation mode is part of Dokan Pro. In BazaarKit it is free, because a seller being able to say “I'm away” is not a premium feature — it is basic hygiene for a marketplace that wants orders fulfilled.

Why nothing gets unpublished

This is the part worth understanding, because it is the difference between holiday mode and the workaround it replaces.

When a seller unpublishes their catalogue by hand, several things quietly break. Their catalogue visibility settings are lost. Their listing dates reset, so when they republish, items that were carefully ordered come back looking newly listed. Anything scheduled or set to a particular visibility has to be reconstructed from memory. For a seller with three items that is annoying; for a seller with two hundred it is a lost afternoon, and they will not do it again.

Holiday mode changes nothing about the products. Not the post status, not the stock level, not the catalogue visibility, not the dates. The products stay exactly as they are and are simply left out of the shop's queries while the seller is away. Switching it off does not restore anything, because nothing was altered in the first place.

What the vendor does

The control sits at the top of the vendor's Dokan dashboard. When their shop is open, it is a quiet line of text and a button:

Once paused, it becomes something they cannot miss, so nobody ever leaves their shop closed by accident and wonders where their sales went:

That is the entire interaction. One click to pause, one click to reopen, and it takes effect immediately.

What buyers see

Mostly, they see nothing — the seller's items are simply not in the shop, the same as any item that is not for sale.

The exception is the seller's own store page, which someone may well have bookmarked or found through a link. An empty store page reads as “this seller has gone” or “this site is broken”, and neither is true. So instead the page carries a short, friendly notice explaining that the shop is on holiday and inviting the buyer to check back — which keeps the seller's followers rather than losing them.

Everywhere it applies

A WooCommerce product reaches a buyer through a surprising number of routes, and covering only the obvious one leaves a seller taking orders they cannot fulfil. Holiday mode is enforced across all of them:

• The shop, category pages and search — including a plain site search, not only product-scoped ones.
• Related products, up-sells, cross-sells and widgets — anything that respects WooCommerce's product visibility.
• Product shortcodes and their widgets, which run their own queries and render cards directly.
• Block product grids and the Store API, which is how the shop page itself is built on a block theme.
• Themes and plugins that build their own product rails using WooCommerce's product query functions.
• Buying — the products are made not purchasable, and adding to the basket is blocked outright.

That last one is the important one. Hiding a product from listings is presentation; refusing the sale is the part that actually protects the seller and the buyer. Someone arriving on a direct link from an old email cannot place an order that nobody is there to post.

Existing orders carry on as normal

Holiday mode stops new sales, and nothing else. Orders the seller has already taken behave exactly as they always did — they can be marked as shipped, refunded, discussed in messages, disputed, and paid out.

This is deliberate. A seller going away for a fortnight usually still has last week's orders to post before they leave, and a seller who is ill still needs their money to arrive. If you use escrow, held payouts keep releasing on their normal schedule while the shop is paused.

Settings

There are none, and that is intentional. Holiday mode has no options screen because there is nothing meaningful to configure — it is a switch that belongs to each seller, and it lives on their dashboard where they will actually find it.

As the marketplace owner you can see who is away from your usual WordPress user and vendor screens, and the switch is per seller, so one vendor being on holiday never affects another.

How to check it is working

1. Sign in as a vendor with at least one published product and open the Dokan dashboard.
2. Click Pause my shop. The amber banner should appear straight away.
3. In a private window — so you are not signed in — open the shop page. That vendor's items should be gone, while other vendors' items are untouched.
4. Open one of the paused vendor's product URLs directly. The page loads, but it cannot be added to the basket.
5. Open the vendor's store page. You should see the “This shop is on holiday” notice rather than an empty grid.
6. Go back to the dashboard and reopen the shop. Everything should return immediately, with the listings exactly as they were.

You can walk through all of this on the live demo, where you can sign in as a vendor without setting anything up.

Troubleshooting

The products are still showing after pausing

Check you are looking as a logged-out visitor rather than as the vendor or as an administrator, and clear any page cache. Aggressive full-page caching plugins and CDNs will happily serve a shop page they built before the shop was paused; that is the cache being a cache, not holiday mode failing.

A paused seller's items appear in an unusual place

Holiday mode covers WooCommerce's own queries and the standard extension points. A theme or plugin that fetches products with a completely hand-written database query, bypassing WooCommerce entirely, is outside anything a plugin can intercept. If you find one, tell us where it is and we will look at whether it can be covered.

A vendor says they cannot find the switch

It is at the top of their Dokan dashboard, not in their store settings. If it is missing entirely, confirm the BazaarKit core is active and that the account really is a vendor rather than a customer.

Frequently asked questions

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