I know this question has been addressed before but the Shopify solution isn’t terribly good. Hate to mention Ebay but they have a really easy solution that doesn’t make it look like your store is closing down and doesn’t disrupt sales. The Shopify solution is to have the site require a password to proceed to content - that to me says “I’ve gone out of business”. The other solution is leave the site active but don’t allow purchases. This would just encourage less loyal customers to just go to the next on-line seller who is available for business.
It would be a much better solution to have a pop up that can be written by the web owner, something like “Apologies for inconvenience but we are taking a short break and returning dd/mm/yyyy and will fulfill your order as soon as we return. We understand this may not suit but hope that you are happy for a short delay and you continue to place your order”.
This way the customer can decide if they want to remain or move to another seller or (hopefully) happy for a short delay and still put through their order. This way they don’t get a chance to change their mind and decide they should save their money.
I hope this can be included as I have no doubt most smaller single operator sellers would appreciate this flexibility.
Thank you.