How the Etsy algorithm is working in 2025.

Are you looking at the buyer app or seller?

For bracelets it seems the majority of the listings have the first pic showing an arm wearing the item

very informative as always, thank you Kara! :)

I'm a search buyer, not a browse buyer... this change irks me. I'm grown, I don't need them to hold my hand and guide me. It's the same when I shop in person, I don't want a salesperson following me around. I know what I'm looking for; back off. I don't mind 'suggestions', but full blown misdirecting is annoying.

Very interesting, thank you! I’m not a “beige” person and neither is my shop so I’ll need to drive more traffic, and if I’m doing that I’ll likely drive some of it to my website instead.

Very insightful, thank you.

Not all of us are selling gifts. I sell the kind of crafting supplies that you can't really browse for, you have to search.

As if that's not bad enough, search is horrible. Around Christmas, I searched for acrylic sheets. I kid you not, the first page only had about 7 listings for acrylic sheets, the rest of the listings were Christmas sweaters and hoodies. How is that helpful? That is the kind of thing that will make a potential buyer leave Etsy and go somewhere else.

I've had 40 sales since 2007. I checked my stats and 0 views from seo, 75% from my own traffic. So I just sent everything to square and will send my traffic there so etsy doesn't lure MY customer away to China made cheap stuff mass produced. Tired of competing.

While this kind of thing may benefit makers who produce multiple identical items (which is fine), it will skew more toward promoting mass merchandising/mass produced everything (hello Amazon wannabe). All this makes vintage/antique and one of a kind handmade items virtually invisible, which is everything I sell :-(

Thank you for taking the time to create this video. Just to really drive home that Etsy really sucks, when I go to Google and search for my product, one that has a specific Bible verse on it, other Etsy listings of that product with that verse show up in the Google shopping search, but not mine. If their aim was to suck at this in every way possible, they nailed it.

It is very discouraging to not even show up in Etsy search at all. It will go to about 20 pages and that's the end. No telling how many products are never shown. It seems that I won't get "shown" unless I make some sales, and I can't make sales because no one ever sees my products. I post to Facebook and Pinterest and get a little traffic. It seems ads are the only way and I see almost every seller running ads is also having a sale. Perhaps if I just give my stuff away, I might get some traction. Yes, maybe just make it free and charge a ton for shipping. Perhaps I'm on to something. I'm kidding, of course, but it does seem as if Etsy only wants to sell what they want to sell and what seems like a sure thing for them and just not give any new products or sellers a chance. They do say in their documentation that they show new listings. That is a bold faced lie. I have over 100 products, that I know people are searching for and I am lucky if Etsy gives me 2 views a week.

I wish I could remember exactly where I saw it, but it was an off hand mention about a year ago that they use AI to choose etsy picks. Basically they trained the AI to search for photos that looked like Etsy picks in the past. That's why you get the same look in them and why about a year ago people started noticing that things that they only just listed where getting selected. My photos are doomed because I have an aesthetic with my own brand that isn't the beigetastic Instagram aesthetic they like.

Thanks, this sort of confirmed what I noticed and it is not just the economy . Around Nov I started to see Etsy picks being featured prominently for my area and a corresponding significant drop in sales as I have no Etsy picks in my shop.

The fact that they have a “deals” button on the app is probably driving prices up. If I list an item, knowing that I will need to put it on sale, I’m going to jack up the price before I list it. People don’t know what the price was, they just see the percentage of the discount. It’s the same thing with free shipping. Jack up the price to absorb the cost of shipping. Buyers know you’re doing it but all they see is free shipping. In reality, there are no “deals” , it’s all perception. Just my .02

I decided to go on to Etsy I didn't go in incognito mode I logged in to my account and I clicked on the garden gift tab.
And I went to the filters page option on the left and clicked it to the country location where I live. I scrolled down and unchecked the etsy's pick box.

How disappointing. My items are one offs and I rarely make the same thing more than once. My prices are not what most people would spend on gifts.

Thank you, very insightful. I'm a vintage seller so I have mostly one offs and am not likely to have a Popular Now or Best Seller listing. But, if I have a bunch of vintage garden spades, when one sells does it make the listing look like it sells often if I copy the sold listing, change the pics, and tweak the descriptions and tags?

At this point. It’s impossible to keep up. How are you supposed to know what to do what to tweak. It’s exhausting enough to do everything else that requires running a business. Then we have to keep up with their new algorithm that changes every 4 mins

And not a vintage item in sight. Mine must be found in search 🤔

This is so helpful! Thank you very much.

Thanks for the info. It’s doesn’t make sense for seller that make one of a kind items.

Great video Kara! Thank you so much.

I have the latest Etsy seller app and if I view my store from it, then it counts me as a view. I don’t think it supposed to do that.

is it possible please to ask a question in private if I may

To be clear...Etsy buyers do both searching for items and browsing like I'm showing in the video (clicking on things that are suggested.) But the entire system seems to be designed now to get people into the browsing side of it instead of letting them search without filters for things. You need to send your own traffic to Etsy more than ever before in order to get sales started. Once that happens, the cycle will maintain itself for a while and your sales will probably continue. When that slows down, you'll need to get things started again!