EP 29. What's New on Etsy: Updates Worth Knowing About (and My Honest Take on Each)

In today's episode I'm breaking down updates from Etsy's latest seller announcements, from a small fix that protects your listing thumbnails to a deep dive into where Etsy's AI tools are headed for sellers. I'm giving you my honest take on each one, including where I'm optimistic and where I'm staying cautious. 

Plus, I'm opening applications for my Founding Student Cohort, a one month do-it-with-me experience to help you build (or finally grow) your Etsy print on demand shop before the biggest selling season of the year.

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Full Etsy Seller Updates Article

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:05

Hey there and welcome to the Modern Etsy Seller, the podcast where busy women build, grow, and profit on Etsy. I'm your host, Melissa Carroll, a full-time teacher, a busy mom, and an Etsy seller who's built two successful Etsy shops in the small moments of everyday life. Here you'll find simple strategies, real behind the scenes insight, and the clarity you need to stop second guessing and start moving forward one intentional step at a time. Let's get to it. Hey guys, welcome back. Before we jump into today's episode, I want to tell you about something I've been working on behind the scenes. Over the past several months, I've been building a step-by-step program that teaches women exactly how to build an Etsy print on demand shop from scratch. It's almost ready, and before I officially launch it, I'm looking for 15 to 20 women to join my founding student cohort. If you've been wanting to start an Etsy print on demand shop but don't know where to begin, or you've already opened one but you're not seeing the results you hoped for, or you've ever thought if someone would just tell me exactly what to do step by step. I know I could do this, then this is for you. The cohort will run throughout the month of August, and the goal is simple. By the end of the month, your shop will be open, you'll have at least 10 products listed, you'll have a repeatable system for creating more products, and you'll be ready for the biggest selling season of the year. I opened my Etsy shop at the end of August 2024, right before I was heading back into the classroom for the new school year. And by December 31st of that year, I had 1,131 sales and $28,950.54 in revenue. August and September really are fantastic times to get your shop open. The program is a do-it with me roadmap made up of short lessons that each end with one clear action. So you're never left wondering what to do next. As a founding student, you'll get lifetime access to the course, direct access to me all August inside of a private community, weekly group coaching calls, and a private 30-minute one-on-one coaching session with me. And if you complete the program requirements, you'll also receive free lifetime access to my membership when it launches this fall. If that sounds like something you'd be interested in, there's a link in the show notes where you can apply. Applications close Sunday, July 27th. I'll personally be reviewing every application. And if you have any questions, just shoot me an email at melissa at melissacarol.co. Okay, let's get into today's episode. Today I want to walk you through some of the Etsy updates that have recently been released. Everything I'm about to walk you through is coming straight from Etsy's own seller updates. I'll link the full article for you because I'm only covering a few of them here today in this episode. There are more in there if you want to go dig around yourself. First up, Etsy just rolled out listing thumbnail previews. On the surface, this may not sound like a big deal, but if you had to change the main photo of 500 listings after they changed the desktop thumbnail dimensions like I did, then you would understand why I love this update. So before you publish a listing, you can now see exactly how your photo will look when cropped to a couple different dimensions. When cropped to a square, or when shown as a portrait rectangle, or when cropped to a landscape rectangle. And this means that you will be able to see if anything important gets cropped off. You'll be able to catch this stuff before you even hit publish, not after. My take on this is use it. Every single time you publish a new listing, check the preview before you go live. Takes just a couple seconds and it protects the one job your thumbnail has, which is stopping the scroll. Next up is a batch of updates to the Etsy seller app. So first you can scan a shipping label with your phone's camera and it pulls up the matching order automatically. Now, this does not matter to us as print-on-demand sellers, but if you also run a handmade shop, this is a nice update for you. The app update that I'm excited about is that you can now issue full or partial refunds, refunds right from the app. And it shows you exactly how the refund affects the order before you submit it. Previously, all you could do from the app was cancel an order. You couldn't refund. While I obviously don't want to have to give refunds, it absolutely happens. And if you're out and about when the situation arises, you can handle it in the moment, right from the app, rather than relying on remembering to do it later. Another app update I like is that there's now a more detailed order view. So you can see the gifting details or the buyer notes all in one place without digging around. I realize none of this is flashy, but if you're running your shop from your phone in between everything else in your life, which a lot of us are, this is the kind of update that makes our lives a little bit easier. Third, Etsy now has introduced something called interested shopper offers. So what this is, is an offer that you create that Etsy sends to potential buyers who have shown an interest in your product by engaging with it in some way, but they haven't bought it. This offer can be in the form of a percentage off, a dollar amount off, or a free shipping offer. Once you set it up, you can leave it alone, just like the abandoned car offers and the thank you offers, and then Etsy will take care of the rest. They do this by sending these offers through email. And actually, that's important to note because it will only go to people who have opted into receiving emails from Etsy. But according to Etsy and the data that they have from a 30-day testing window that ran from March 18th to April 17th of this year, shops using this reach about twice as many potential buyers on average compared to other targeted offers alone. Honestly, this is one of those things that can't hurt and potentially can help. As long as you have room in your profit margin for discounts and sales, I'm offered testing out these types of offers. That brings us to update number four. Etsy has given us more control over promo code redemption. If you've ever wanted to share a promo code publicly on social media or in an email or even just to a particular buyer, but didn't like the idea that one person could use it repeatedly, Etsy has fixed that. You can now set a redemption limit on a promo code. Or my preference, you can restrict it to one use per buyer. I feel like this one control changes what's actually safe to share publicly. Just make sure that you tell the buyers the limit up front so nobody's surprised at checkout. Update five. Etsy redesigned the off-site ads dashboard. Let's talk about what off-site ads are for a second. For those who aren't familiar with them, Etsy advertises our products off of the Etsy platform, which sounds great until you realize as a seller you're paying for that ad, whether you want to or not. So if one of these ads that Etsy runs on your behalf results in a sale within 30 days of the buyer clicking the ad, you have to pay 15% of the amount you made from the sale. As print-on-demand sellers, that means the amount we made before paying our provider. Now you can opt out of offsite ads if you make less than $10,000 in a year. And I typically recommend that depending on your profit margins when you're just starting out. But once you hit $10,000 in revenue within a 365-day period, offsite ads are automatically turned on. Also, when you hit that $10,000 milestone, the offsite ad fee goes down a little bit. So it goes from 15% to 12%. Now, to be clear, offsite ads aren't all bad. They have the potential to bring in sales that otherwise wouldn't have been there, but that does come at a cost. So you have to consider that in your pricing. So the update. They have redesigned the dashboard, expanding the insights they provide about the off-site ads, which frankly they should have done a long time ago. I kind of feel like if you're gonna force them on us, then you should let us know exactly what's happening with those ads. So now there is a dedicated place for you to see your revenue, your fees, and the clicks that came from the off-site ads. It also shows you which channels, such as Google, Pinterest, or Facebook, and which of your listings are actually driving off-site ad traffic. You'll be able to see traffic from off-site ads even when it didn't end in a direct sale now, too. So that's great. All right, update six. Etsy is referring to this update as balanced review insights. And it has to do with which reviews they show the potential buyers. I'm gonna read what it says word for word here. It says, we're making review highlights more balanced by showing both positive and constructive themes from buyer reviews. Giving buyers a fuller picture of customer experiences can help them make more informed decisions and build confidence in their purchases. Honestly, I have some mixed feelings on this. I did an episode recently on customer service and I talked about how I actually am okay with a review that points something out that the buyer needed to know. Sizing is the big one for me. If someone says an item was smaller than expected, that usually means they didn't read the dimensions in the listing or look closely at the photos. I'm not trying to trick anyone with thinking something is bigger than it is. So if a review makes the next buyer double check the size before they order so they know exactly what they're getting, I'm fine with that. But here's where it gets tricky. Say you have 800 reviews and five of them mention the item arrived later than expected. That's not really a problem. That's just what happens sometimes in this business to a very small number of people. And now that gets highlighted as a theme, front and center, for every single buyer who looks at your listing. That's the part I'd want to watch. A true pattern that gets surfaced can be helpful. A tiny handful of outliers getting treated like a pattern is not going to be helpful. In fact, it could hurt us. I'll be paying attention to this one to see what types of constructive themes they start focusing on. The last one we're going to talk about here are AI-powered tools. Etsy has been rolling out a whole suite of AI-powered tools for sellers. Their approach, at least according to what they've published, is that every one of these tools stays optional. You're always the one reviewing and approving anything before it touches your shop. And really, reviewing anything AI puts out should be a standard practice. So I'm going to briefly share the four AI tools mentioned in this article. First is AI-powered shop stat summaries. This is being tested, and I don't have it in either of my shops as of today. But it looks like that instead of your stats page just showing the numbers and graphs, it will also take the data and give you some key takeaways highlighting trends in your performance and what might be influencing them. Also related to shop stats, and also still in the testing phase, is a stats assistant. This one's different from the summaries. Here it's saying that you can ask it questions about your shop right inside shop manager, and it'll tell you what's working, what needs attention, and where to focus next. For now, if you see this in your shop, again, I don't have it in mind, I take what it says with a grain of salt. I still have Etsy flagging my listings, telling me to change my titles. And at this point, we know that shortening our titles and changing them to Etsy's AI created titles is more likely to hurt our listings than to help them. And so what it suggests in this stat assistant could very likely lead us astray. So at this point, if you have the stats assistant, I wouldn't make any changes based solely on what it says. Next is AI-powered attribute suggestions for listings. So it will now suggest attributes for you based on your category, your description, and your featured photo. I mean, I don't know how necessary this is. Maybe it could be helpful if you're someone who skips the attributes section of a listing because adding them really does help you show up in the search. But other than that, I don't see this saving lots of time or creating a better listing. The last one here is AI powered support through the support chat. A ton of other websites out there already offer this. So I know we've all likely experienced using AI-powered support. It's fine for basic questions if you don't feel like doing a search for your answer. But ideally, it gives you a way to either ask for a live agent to speak to, or at the very least, a way to send your questions straight to support where someone will get back to you in an appropriate amount of time. I actually just had to use Anywhere POD's AI support last night, and it allowed me to send the questions straight to them. And Chris, the main guy behind Anywhere POD, got back to me super early this morning. So if Etsy's support does something like that, it could be great. But right now, I don't know that it's anything more than AI sending you to the spot it thinks you need in their seller's handbook. Worth keeping an eye on these things and just knowing that they exist for now though. Okay, so there you have it. Seven of Etsy's latest updates. Like I said, there are more in the full article that I'll link for you in case you want to go through it yourself. And if today's episode got you thinking about finally building that Etsy shop the right way with someone walking beside you instead of handing you another course and vanishing, applications for my founding student cohort are open right now. The links in the show notes. I hope to see some of your applications in my inbox. Thanks for spending this time with me, and I will see you in the next episode.