Etsy shop attributes

While frequent changes to the rules on Etsy may cause you a headache, the most recent one is particularly useful. Etsy has introduced attributes, which have to be selected for each item. They announced this some time ago, and that they will be introducing them gradually, without notifying about trials and tests. And one of these days I found out I could select a colour for my etsy products.

click on the image to enlarge

Well, I embraced this change as I had always thought it necessary, as previously the colour selection was based on the item pictures. This led to confusion if an item was photographed not on white, but against a different colour background. White balance errors could also make your white or other colour item accidentally appear while searching for blue or red. Finally, Etsy decided that the sellers can decide on the colour of the item - hooray!

So I set out to update over one thousand listings that I have in both shops combined. First I did it to Agnes'SewingSupplies, simply because I use Google Chrome to manage it and it turned out faster than Mozilla Firefox. Well, believe it or not, once I updated half of the stock, they started selling faster. And curiously, only the updated items. So I got back to updating as soon as I could. Once I finished, I had the double of the orders I usually have, and no single order from the other shop, in which I had managed to update about ten listings.

Maybe it is just a coincidence, but something is telling me that it does affect the search result. After all, the attributes are added along material and other info in the right hand side column, and constitute strong keywords. So I updated the other 500 listings in the other shop immediately.

Another point: the information listed in 'Overview' will appear on the Etsy app

And I do recommend doing so, even if you have not 1000 but six or ten times more items. While Etsy may decide to modify this feature or add other attributes in the near future, which will require updating all the listings again, it still pays to work on them now. If you decide to start adding attributes once this process has finished, you may lose many customers who will be looking for items in the meantime.