Just before the holidays I noticed there was an increase in sales from my Etsy shop. That’s not surprising since there’s always a holiday surge in sales. What was surprising was how many of my very old listings were selling. Items that had been in my shop since I first opened my Etsy shop in 2016.
When I started listing items on Etsy, I had no idea what I was doing. I jumped into the deep end with both feet and a weight tied around my ankle. Since then I have learned how to swing and I’ve unshackled myself. In other words I know a bit more about how to create a listing that sells, so I’ve been slowly updating my listings.
Can I use AI for Etsy listings?
Since this was already in progress I thought what a great time for an experiment! If you were around for the Christmas for Free experiment then you know I love experiments.
I decided that I would see if I could feed the Etsy sellers handbook with all it’s “best practices” into AI and create the perfect listing. Yeah, I know I got goosebumps too!
To decide which listing would be the happy recipient of this update I ran a report in Etsy to see which listings had the least traffic in the past year. Here’s the sad little listing that is now due for an AI glow up!
This amber glass bud vase is one of my original Etsy listings. I know because when I started out I had a sad little backdrop, and a table covered in burlap that I photographed on in my unfinished basement. Since then I’ve upgraded to a lightbox.
I thought I would leave the photos alone and focus solely on the listing itself and what the algorithm would be looking for when buyers typed their search parameters. Starting with the tags, because I know from my research that these are oh so important. Here are the original tags.
Oh boy! No wonder no one is finding this vase. There is no need to repeat keywords because computers can find them in any order. For instance, let’s say I put the keywords “amber vase” and “blown glass”. If someone searched for “glass vase” this listing would still come up even though the words are not next to one another in my tags. So repeating “vase” so many times is wasting other descriptors I could use to improve my listing’s reach.
Time to ask the AI for help. I asked ChatGPT to generate 20 keywords and to not repeat any of the words. Here’s what it gave me for 20 unique keywords.
So it’s not perfect but it did give me enough to work with and it took less time than it would have taken me to brainstorm all of these keywords.
Next I asked the AI to take Etsy’s advice on crafting a listing headline. The original headline is in the listing above. Here’s what AI generated.
Not bad!
Then I asked AI to generate a keyword rich description of the item based on Etsy’s guidelines. Here’s the original description (which is so sad).
Here’s the information I fed to the AI from Etsy about how to generate a good product description.
Here’s what it generated:
Okay, I’ll keep that one with a few minor changes (the first line had to go). I left in the condition description and added my own verbiage that I add to all my listings. It includes the phrase “vintage aesthetic” which is a top search term and one of the keywords I added that AI did not generate.
Now, I noticed there are some things missing from the listing. Specifically the measurements under the attributes section.
Etsy likes when you use all the descriptors available to you. Fill out as much as you possibly can. So I added the height and width. I also added the style of vase and since I was unsure of the style I called it boho/eclectic. Sue me.
All the updates have been made and the listing is published with all the new information. Now we just have to wait and see. I will check back in a month to see if the listing is getting more traffic.
We’re embarking on an exciting experiment! If you’ve stumbled upon one of my blog posts that resonated with you, I kindly ask you to share it across your social media channels. Your simple action could introduce my content to someone who might find it invaluable. Let’s join forces and witness the power of collective sharing. Your support is immensely appreciated as I strive to spread knowledge and inspiration far and wide. Thank you for being an integral part of my community!
