Thirteen tags. Nine of them wasted.
Etsy gives every listing thirteen tag slots of up to twenty characters each. Most sellers fill them with words already in the title, which buys nothing, because the title was already matched.
The gap is almost never the writing.
Sellers who come looking for help with a quiet listing usually want the description made more appealing. It is very rarely the description. Etsy's own handbook says shoppers see only the first few words of a title in search results, and its keyword guidance treats a tag as a full search phrase — "gift for new mum" — rather than a label. So the two fields carrying most of the weight are the opening words of the title and thirteen phrases nobody thinks of as writing at all.
Spend all thirteen on synonyms of the title and you have covered one query thirteen times. Spend them on distinct phrases — recipient, occasion, style, material — and you are matchable against thirteen different searches, at no cost, using space Etsy has already given you.
The second thing that turns up constantly is not a ranking problem at all. Etsy's house rules require a production partner to be disclosed on a handmade listing, and require an item to be at least twenty years old before it can sit in the Vintage category — "vintage-style" is a different thing and has to be labelled as one. Sellers get both wrong innocently, and a rewrite that made the copy warmer while leaving either in place would have polished a policy breach.
A real listing, before and after.
From the Etsy rubric the job is briefed with. Just the tag field, because that is where the argument lives — a wooden sign listed as "Handmade Boho Wall Art Rustic Wood Sign Home Decor Gift Present Unique Wall Hanging Farmhouse".
wall art · wood sign · boho · decor · gift · home · rustic · wall · sign · art
family name sign · new home gift · rustic wall decor · personalised wood sign · housewarming gift · farmhouse wall art · wedding gift wood · engraved family sign · [ADD FACT: 5 more distinct long-tail tags — recipient/occasion/material combinations not yet covered]
Every word in the first row is already in the title. All ten of them. Three slots were left empty and the seven that were used bought nothing that the title had not already matched.
The second row shares no word order with the title at all. Housewarming, wedding, new home — occasions Etsy indexes as separate queries, sitting in the field built to hold them. And it stops at eight rather than padding to thirteen, because the last five have to come from the seller: a tag invented to fill a slot is the original mistake with better vocabulary.
The same pass rewrites the title and the description, and every fact it does not have — the dimensions, the wood, the personalisation character limit, the processing time — comes back as a gap rather than a guess. But the tags are where a quiet listing usually turns.
Three steps, and what the money buys.
- Paste the listing. Title, tags and description as they stand today — not a tidied-up version. A public link works too. The tags matter more than anything else you paste, so include all of them even if there are only four.
- One top-up. That is store credit, and this job uses never more than 40p. It spends only what the finished report costs, and the difference goes back to your balance, so one payment usually covers seventeen listings. A change is another go at the job, so it costs pence too.
- You get a score and a rewrite. A score out of 100, the problems ranked worst first, a rewritten title, description and tag set, and a list of things to go and do away from the keyboard — measure it, photograph the flaw, confirm the postage.
If the job fails to generate, it spends nothing.
Who should and should not buy this.
Worth it if
- Your listing gets views and no sales, or no views at all.
- You have never filled all thirteen tag slots, or you filled them in a hurry two years ago.
- You sell something personalised and the listing does not say what can be personalised or how to ask.
- You list genuine vintage and are not certain your age wording is right.
- You use a production partner and have never worked out what has to be disclosed.
Skip it if
- Your problem is photography. Nothing written can fix a listing whose first image is dark or has no size reference, and the report will tell you that rather than working around it.
- You want your shop reviewed. This reads one listing at a time.
- You want it to promise Christmas delivery. It will not tie a delivery date to an occasion your own processing time cannot support.
- You are hoping it will write the missing facts for you. It will not state a material, a dimension or a care instruction you did not give it.
What Etsy sellers ask before touching a listing.
How old does something have to be before I can call it vintage?
Twenty years, under Etsy's own House Rules, and it is a category rule rather than a style word — an item made to look like the 1970s is vintage-style and belongs somewhere else. This is one of the few places where the wrong word is a listing removal rather than a ranking problem, so it will not apply vintage to anything you have not dated and it will not take the adjective as evidence of age. If you know the decade, say it. If you are guessing, better to find that out now than when a buyer asks.
Do I have to say that I use a production partner?
Yes, where you use one. Etsy's seller policy requires the disclosure on a handmade listing and it covers more arrangements than sellers expect, including anyone who prints, casts, cuts or assembles to your design. It will not write handmade over an arrangement you have described as something else, and it will not complete the disclosure for you. Sellers tend to read it as an admission. It is closer to the opposite: the listings that get reported are the ones where a buyer worked it out unaided.
Should my thirteen tags repeat the words already in the title?
No, and this is the largest routine waste on the platform. Thirteen tags that are synonyms of each other and of the title cover one idea thirteen times over. Each runs to twenty characters, so the ones worth having carry what the title cannot: the occasion, the recipient, the room it goes in, the style, the phrase somebody types when they do not know what your item is called. The report moves the duplicates out and names the searches your listing was invisible in.
Nobody can tell how big it is from my photographs.
That is a listed failure here and it costs more than it appears to, because a buyer who cannot judge scale does not message to ask — a mug, a print and a wall hanging all photograph as a rectangle on a white background. The fix is something familiar in the frame, or the item held or in place, with the dimensions in the text as well. It will not state a measurement you have not given: the numbers arrive as marked gaps for you to fill in.
I offer personalisation and I still get messages asking about it.
Because personalisation as a checkbox tells a buyer nothing about the process, and every question they send is one your listing left open: how many characters, which fonts, what happens if they get it wrong, what it does to the dispatch time, whether they see it before it ships. Message me for options is the phrasing that generates those messages rather than preventing them. Written out as a process, the same listing takes the order instead of starting a conversation.
My processing time and my Christmas promise do not agree.
That inconsistency is checked as its own failure, and it is the one that produces the complaints — a listing saying it ships in one to three weeks above a banner promising delivery by the 24th is a refund with a date on it. The two have to say the same thing, and the number that governs is the one you can meet in your worst week rather than your best. If you sell for occasions, state the cut-off in the listing rather than leaving a buyer to do the arithmetic.
Do I need a returns policy if I am only a small shop?
If you sell professionally to buyers in the UK or EU, a fourteen-day right of withdrawal applies whether or not your listing mentions it, and Etsy documents this for sellers. A listing announcing no returns is not disapplying anything, it is telling a buyer you may be difficult, which is a conversion problem stacked on top of a compliance one. It will flag a missing or contradictory returns position and it will not tell you whether you are compliant, because that is a question about your business rather than your listing.
Check a listing.
Copy the title, the tags and the description into the box. It reads them as they are and tells you what is missing before it tells you what is clumsy.
Top up once. No subscription. About 28p — never more than 40p.