[00:00:00] Okay. So if you've been on Etsy for more than about five minutes, you've probably noticed that the platform has had a new CEO for most of this year. But I don't really want to do one of those dramatic everything has changed episodes because Kruti Patel Goyal took over in January. That part is old news now.
Kaylie Edwards: What is more useful is looking at what Etsy has actually done since she took over, and what the latest numbers are telling us, and whether any of it should change what you're doing in your shop. Because, as usual, there is the official corporate version, there is the seller forum version where Etsy is apparently dying before lunchtime, and then there is the much less exciting but far more useful middle ground.
Hello, and welcome back to the Creative Juggle Joy. If you're new here, hi, I'm Kaylie. So today I'm going to translate the corporate language into normal creative business [00:01:00] language and give you a few practical things you can check in your own Etsy shop. No panic, no pretending platforms are perfectly safe, and no suggestion that changing three tags at half past 11 tonight will magically fix your sales.
Let's get into it. A quick bit of context. Josh Silverman had been Etsy's CEO since 2017. Etsy announced in October 2025 that he would step down, and Kruti Patel Goyal officially became CEO on the 1st of January 2026. Silverman moved into the executive chair role. This wasn't Etsy bringing in a complete outsider who was never seen in the inside of the company.
Goyal had already held senior roles at Etsy, including president and chief growth officer, and she had previously led Depop, which Etsy owned at the time. That matters because this looks less like somebody arriving and binning the entire strategy, and more like somebody narrowing the focus and deciding which parts [00:02:00] of the existing strategy Etsy wants to push harder.
One of her first big moves was also to simplify the business itself. Etsy completed the sale of Depop to eBay at the end of July, saying that it would allow the company to focus more clearly on the core Etsy marketplace. Again, that doesn't directly change one of your listings tomorrow morning, but it does tell us where management wants its attention to go.
What the latest Etsy results actually say. The clearest snapshot we have is Etsy's second quarter update, released in August twenty twenty-six. It covered the three months ending in June and was the first full quarter that sat completely under Goyal's time as CEO. Etsy marketplace GMS grew by seven point five percent compared with the same quarter the year before, reaching about two point six billion US dollars.
GMS means gross merchandise sales, which is simply the total value of the goods [00:03:00] sold through the marketplace itself. It's not Etsy's profit, and it is not what individual sellers earned. It tells us how much buying activity went through Etsy overall.
It was also the third quarter in a row where Etsy's Marketplace GMS had grown year on year. That is worth noticing because the story around Etsy for quite a while had been one of slowing or declining marketplace sales. One good quarter doesn't solve every seller concern, I know. But the current figures do not fit the very simple Etsy is dying storyline either.
The mobile app grew faster than the marketplace overall. Sales made through the app were up 12.5% year on year. That is probably the number in this whole update that gives an ordinary seller the clearest job to do, and I'll come back to that in a minute. At the same time, Etsy announced restructuring that affected roughly 220 roles or around 12% of its workforce.
Etsy said the changes were primarily in product and [00:04:00] engineering and were intended to create smaller teams and put more expertise into machine learning. Now, layoffs are still layoffs. There are real people behind that number losing their jobs, and I don't want to talk about it as if it is just a clear line in a business plan because it's not You know, people losing their jobs is not good.
From a seller's point of view, though, the important distinction is that Etsy described this as a refocusing of its product and engineering work, with more attention going into discovery, matching, and personalization So discovery, matching, and personalization in normal language. Those three words sound like something lifted straight from an earnings call.
So what do they actually mean for us? Discovery is how a shopper comes across an item when they do not already know the exact listing they want. Matching is Etsy deciding which listings are relevant to what that person has searched for or shown an interest in. Personalization is the platform adjusting what it shows based on that particular [00:05:00] shopper's behavior and context.
In other words, two people can search for something similar and still see different results. Etsy is not working with one fixed shelf where every item sits in the same position for everybody. Etsy's own current search policy says its first match is a shopper's query against the information in listings including titles, tags, descriptions, categories, and attributes.
It then ranks those possible results using several signals. Those include relevance, clicks, views, favorites, purchases, listing, and shop quality, customer service, shipping, and context specific to the buyer. This is why SEO still matters, but SEO on Etsy cannot be reduced to cramming title with every keyword you can think of.
Your words help Etsy understand what the item is. Your photographs, price, shipping information, reviews, and the way shoppers respond to the listing [00:06:00] help Etsy judge whether that item is a useful result. I want to make a careful distinction here. This does not mean a new seller is doomed because they do not have years of sales data.
Etsy says new listings receive a small temporary boost so the system can learn how buyers interact with them. It does mean that once somebody finds your listing, the rest of the listing has to do its job. Getting the clicks is only the first bit
Practical check one: audit your shop on a phone. This is important because app sales grew faster than Etsy marketplace's overall sales. I would start with a very boring but useful five-minute task. Open your shop on a phone as if you were a customer, not in a shop manager, not while thinking I know what this is supposed to say."
Look at it on the same small screen your customer is using. Check the first image. Can you immediately tell what the product is? If it's a digital product, can somebody understand what they will receive without squinting at [00:07:00] a tiny mock-up? Is it clear that it's a digital product and not a physical product to be shipped?
Check the crop. Make sure the important part of the image is still visible in Etsy's mobile thumbnail and has not been cropped off in an unfortunate place. Check the beginning of the title, put the clearest description near the front. Do not make a shopper work through a decorative product name before they find out what you are actually selling them.
Check the choices, variations, sizes, personalization instructions need to make sense on a small screen. If the customer has to decode them, they may simply just leave. Check the final price and delivery information. Look at what the buyer actually sees once shipping, taxes, or other relevant costs are included.
Surprises rarely help your conversions. You do not need to redo your entire shop today. Pick your top five listings or the five you most want to sell this season and start there
Practical check two: make the listing easier to match. The second [00:08:00] job is to make sure Etsy has clear information to work with. Choose one listing and ask yourself, "If I remove the pretty brand name and all words only another artist would use, would an ordinary buyer still know what this is, who it's for, and when they might buy it?"
Use the most accurate category you can. Fill in relevant attributes rather than skipping them. Use natural phrases in your title tags and match what a buyer may actually type, and make the description useful to the human being who has clicked, because Etsy's policy also lists descriptions among the information used for query matching.
Then look at the gap between the search phrase and the first image. If somebody searches for a personalized teacher thank you card, but the first photograph makes it look like a generic art print, the words in the image are telling two different stories. One useful tip is to look at your shop statistics before changing everything.
Find the search terms already bringing people in. If a relevant phrase is getting views but no sales, the keyword [00:09:00] may not be the problem. The image, offer, price, dispatch time, or clarity of the listing may be where the wobble is. Practical check three: treat Etsy ads as a test. Etsy also talked about better performance from its product listing ads.
That may make Etsy ads worth testing, but I would not take a corporate statement about ad performance as proof that every seller should immediately increase their budget
If you want to test ads and use a small amount you are genuinely comfortable spending and put it behind a few listings that are already strong, I would choose products with clear photographs, a sensible margin, and some evidence that people want them. Advertising a confusing listing usually means paying to discover that it is confusing more quickly.
Give the test a defined period. Track what you spend and what those ads actually return, and remember to account for your product costs and Etsy fees. Revenue on the dashboard is not the [00:10:00] same thing as profit in your pocket. If you do not have the budget or your listings are still being improved, you have not missed some secret window.
Ads are one tool. They are not a requirement for being
Proper business. What I would not do after this news, I would not rewrite every listing in one panic weekend. If you change titles, tags, photographs, and prices all at once, you will have no idea what changes helped or hurt. I would not assume more personalization means keywords no longer matter. Etsy still needs accurate listing information before it can match the product well.
I would not turn the seven point five percent growth figure into a promise about my own shop. Marketplace growth is useful context, but it does not guarantee that your category, product, or individual sales will grow at the same time or the same rate. I would not shrug off the platform risk either. Etsy can be a brilliant source of buyer traffic, especially for a new career business, but you do not own the marketplace, the search system, or the customer relationship in the same way [00:11:00] you own your website or email list And here's the thing, every time Etsy changes something, part of the internet reacts as though every shop will disappear by Friday.
And honestly, I do understand why. It is frightening when a big part of your income depends on a platform you cannot control, especially when you have spent years building reviews, listings, and customer trust there. But panicking over every headline is not a strategy. Blindly trusting the platform is not a strategy either.
The steadier approach is to use Etsy for what Etsy is good at: access to shoppers who are already searching and ready to buy. Then alongside that, keep building things you control. That might be your own website, an email list, repeat customer relationships, wholesale contracts, licensing work, a community, or a second sales channel that makes sense for your business.
You do not need to build all of that at once. Please do not hear me list five things and create yourself five new jobs before the school run today. [00:12:00] Choose one layer of protection and build it gently. For many creative businesses, the simplest starting point is an email list. You can invite people to stay in touch within Etsy's rules, give them a reason to follow your work beyond one purchase, and gradually create a business that does not go completely silent if one platform changes how it shows your products I wrote a fuller post this month about growing and owning your email list, so I'll link that in the show notes if you want that practical version.
The point here is not to drag everybody off Etsy tomorrow. It's to stop any one algorithm from holding the whole business hostage, like I've seen by so many creatives. Your 20-minute Etsy check. If you want one small action after listening, set a timer for 20 minutes and do this. Five minutes, open your shop on your phone and note anything that is hard to see or understand.
Five minutes, choose one priority listing and check the category, attributes, title, tags, and opening lines of the description. Five minutes, compare the search [00:13:00] promise with the first photograph. Make sure they are selling the same thing to the same person. Five minutes, write down one non-Etsy asset you will strengthen this month.
Even if that is simply adding one useful email to your welcome sequence or finally putting a signup form on your website. That is enough. You do not have to respond to a platform update by creating a complete new business plan before tea. So the short version is this. Etsy's marketplace grew again in the second quarter of 2026.
Mobile app sales grew faster than the marketplace overall. The company is putting more attention into discovery, matching, and personalization, and machine learning, while also reducing and reshaping parts of its product and engineering teams. For sellers, this user response is fairly grounded. Make your listings clear.
Check them on mobile. Use accurate titles, tags, categories, and attributes, and pay attention to what happens after somebody clicks. Test ads carefully if they suit your budget. [00:14:00] Don't break the bank. And keep building at least one part of your audience or income that Etsy cannot switch off.
You do not need to predict Etsy's next move. You just need a business that can adapt when the next move comes. That's it for this one. If it helped, send it to another creative who has been getting slightly lost in the Etsy doom scrolls. I'll catch you in the next episode. Until next time, keep creating, keep juggling, and most importantly, keep finding joy in the process.
