Customer and market experience score
Another score! Etsy want people to have the best possible experience on the platform to maintain their brand standards and encourage repeat buyers. For this reason they look at your reputation. If you have a lot of great reviews, you’re more likely to rank higher than if you have a few open cases against your shop.
What does it mean for you?
Provide excellent customer service to encourage 5 star product reviews (reply to convo quickly, ship quickly, represent items accurately so there’s no surprise when they receive item, etc.).
Shipping price
People don’t like paying for shipping and are more likely to buy if the shipping is cheap or even better, free. Etsy knows that from studying shoppers’ behavior, and because just like you – they want sales, they use shipping in their algorithm. Items with lower shipping fees rank higher in search.
UPDATE: From July 30th, 2019 priority placement will be given in US search results to items that ship free and to shops that guarantee free shipping to US buyers on orders of $35 or more.” To learn more about this policy and decide if you should offer
free shipping or not on Etsy, click here. What does it mean for you?
When and if possible, try to lower your shipping fees. I know this isn’t always possible, but again, I am just giving you the facts – and this is a part of the algorithm.
Translations and languages
This one is pretty straightforward and most useful for those of you who want to sell to more than one country/language:
Shopper’s habits
This is the last one and it’s a BIGGIE, so pay close attention.
All the ranking factors we just covered help Etsy decide in which order to display search results, but there is NO SUCH THING as a unified “rank” anymore – meaning that if I type in “baby socks” and you type in “baby socks”, we will not see the same results and not in the same order. This is called Context Specific Results or CSR and was added to the Etsy search algorithm in September 2018. Etsy uses past behaviour data on the platform to show each shopper results that they are more likely to buy. What does it mean for you?
You simply can’t aim at being #1 – there is no such thing anymore. Don’t “check your rank” by typing your keywords to see where your products show up because every shopper sees different results – that’s not helpful. Instead, use your shop’s stats to discover which keywords are driving the most traffic.
That’s it my friend – your factual summary on how the Etsy search actually works. As promised, I have a free Etsy SEO 101 guide + checklist that I created and that you can download here. Let me know: did anything surprise you? 
Thank you for this easy to understand explanation of a rather complex Etsy SEO environment 🙂
Most welcome Deb (what a great name 😉 )! I am glad it helped!