When a potential customer visits your Etsy shop, you want them to have a good experience, and hopefully buy your products.
And to make that happen, there are all sorts of details you need to consider to make sure that you set your Etsy shop up for success.
One area you want to pay special attention to is how you structure your shop. You of course want to make sure each visitor has a good shopping experience and can easily navigate and find what they are looking for, right?
And one important part of ensuring your customer has a good experience is correctly setting up your shop sections.
You may be thinking “Huh? Why are shop sections so important?”
Well, your Etsy shop sections can make a big difference between a shopper staying in your shop – and browsing through multiple product listings – or clicking off your shop and onto another seller’s after the first listing.
Yikes —not good!
Once you’ve done the work of bringing them to your listing with SEO and marketing, we want to keep them browsing your products! Your shop sections are an important ingredient to keeping a shopper in your shop, and that’s what we’re going to talk about in today’s article.
So, ready? Let’s dive in.
When you are setting up your Etsy shop sections, you really want to put yourself in your buyer’s shoes and ask yourself “if I were shopping, how would I want those products to be organized to make finding the product that I need as easy as possible?”
You also want to keep in mind that your shop sections will be used when Etsy recommends “related items” to shoppers on your item’s listing page. So for example, if you search for “sapphire ring” and click on a ring that showed up in the search results, at the bottom of that listing, Etsy will show you pictures of more sapphire rings that you might be interested in both from that same shop AND from other shops.
So you’ll want to keep that in mind to set up your sections in a way that ensures shoppers click on more products from YOUR own shop as much as possible, rather than navigating away to another seller’s shop.
Let’s take a look at some examples of what I’m talking about.
In this first example, I did an Etsy search for “miniature apple earrings” and clicked on one of the results, a super cute and adorable set of miniature apple earrings from a shop called Sol’s’ Creations. Actually if you love miniature food items check out her store because her products are adorable and super realistic – I really like them!
But let’s say for some reason these earrings aren’t quite what I had in mind (I don’t know why it wouldn’t because those are freaking adorable but let’s just imagine to go along this example) OR I am simply browsing at this stage and still a bit undecided as to exactly what it is I want, so I scroll down the page and stumble across the “more from this shop” section to see if this handmade shop has other earrings I might want to consider:
Unfortunately there aren’t a lot of products in the “more from this shop” row that are similar to the miniature apple earrings that I’m looking at. . .
. . . which means that the shop is missing a huge opportunity to keep me on their shop. How?
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It is the result of not having their shop sections set up optimally to group similar products and help customer navigation.
As you can see, in the “more from this shop” section I’m seeing a mix of products — like miniature Christmas earrings, miniature chicken and dollhouse items, and some different miniature apple stuff, but only 2 of them are earrings.
And if I was searching for a miniature Apple earring, it’s likely that I am at least looking for earrings— if not for earrings of miniature food, at least earrings of some sort, and so the products that I’m seeing are a bit of a mix and not showing me products that I am likely to click on — and keep me shopping in that particular shop.
This shop is missing out on a chance to take me to another listing in their shop. Instead what will happen is I will see the listings in the “you may also like” section — which are competitor products— and I most likely will click and start viewing products in another shop because they are all miniature apple jewelry which is most likely what I’m looking for.
Let me show you an example of what happens when shop sections are optimized strategically.
In this example I searched on Etsy for stackable rings, and clicked on a listing of super cool stackable rings I liked by a shop called Alaridesign:
I wanted to look at other options, so I scrolled down the listing to the recommendations section.
In the “more from this shop” section, you can see that all the listings contain other stackable rings options that are really unique and beautiful. Different colors, thicknesses, and other variations that I might like and click on.
This shop owner has done a wonderful job defining their shop sections strategically, so I see more of exactly what I’m looking for.
So it’s tempting for me to click one of these and stay in the shop to keep shopping from that seller, because the recommendations that I’m seeing are totally relevant to my original product search.
Now, the “you may also like” section is doing the same thing and showing me stackable rings as well because they’ve picked up that’s what I’m looking at. BUT . . it kind of levels the playing field and increases the chances that I actually stay in the shop.
So now let’s talk a bit about what you should think about and how you should structure your shop sections—
I’ll use a couple more examples:
In this example I’m looking at a shop that has defined the following sections:
— so there are five sections in all.
I’m seeing a few red flags that show me that the shop owner didn’t ask themselves some important questions when creating their shop sections:
The first thing that I’m seeing that’s a slight red flag is that the yarn craft supplies – which sounds like supplies to make something – doesn’t quite fit in with resin creations, which sounds to me like it’s a finished product that’s ready to ship.
So already I’m wondering “how do those work together?” and “what kinds of things might be in those sections?” It definitely isn’t obvious what products I would find in some of those sections.
Another little red flag I’m seeing is that the words “resin creations” is just not what a shopper will look for.
You’re not going to have someone go on Etsy and type a search in the search box for all things made of resin; they will be looking for a product first (for example: ring or earrings), then they might narrow down and like the look of resin once they see different options for that product search, but it’s unlikely someone would go on Etsy thinking “I am going to buy something made of resin today.”
To me, and I might be wrong, but the resin creation section feels like it was just created to bundle everything in that isn’t yarn.
And even though all the products grouped under resin creations aren’t yarn, if you click on resin creation there are a lot of different things in there— it’s a bit of a mixed bag that doesn’t narrow down your product choices much.
When I clicked on it there were keyrings, a bit of jewelry, and some cheese or charcuterie boards. Yes they are all made with resin, but again it’s a bit of a mixed bag and no matter what you’re looking for there will also be a lot of things you aren’t looking for . . .
Because the shop categorized all these products under resin products, and not a specific category that I’m looking for like jewelry or keyrings. And if I click on one of this seller’s products, it will unfortunately show a mishmash of the resin products in the “more products from this seller” section we talked about earlier. . .
And sadly I will probably end up clicking in the “You might also like” section that contains listings from other shops because those listings are exactly what I’m looking for .
And as a customer, I’m either looking for earrings, or I’m looking for a key ring. But I’m really not going to click on resin creations to find any of those because I’m not sure they’re in there.
So in this example, more specific sections would have helped me navigate the store. Maybe they could have had one shop section that was keyrings, one for jewelry, and one for cheese and charcuterie boards.
Here is another example I want to show you of sections that are definitely not optimized:
This shop has two sections: ready made and made to order. But when I clicked inside of each of these two sections there were all sorts of product types: there were some shelves, some wall hangings and some plant holders.
So the shop was about home decor essentially— but as a shopper, I’m either looking for a wall hanging, or I’m looking for a plant holder, but I’m not going to search for “ready made” or “made to order.“
What’s more important is FIRST for me to find a product that I’m interested in buying. And so it would have been a better use of the sections here to have wall hangings, plant holders, and shelves — the categories of the actual products— because these are the terms that the shopper will search for!
Now I want to show you an example of a shop that does a great job at defining their shop sections:
If you look at this shop’s sections, you will see layered necklace sets, rings, earrings, chains and chokers, bar necklaces, bracelets, anklets, and zodiac and gift ideas.
Now this makes a lot of sense for me as a customer because if I’m looking for a bracelet, I’m just going to go and click on bracelets.
If I’m looking for a necklace, I have a choice of either bar necklaces or chains and chokers. And if I’m not into chokers, I feel confident that if I click on bar necklaces I’m going to find something that I’m probably going to like more than if I clicked on chains and chokers.
So you can see how these sections make it easy for me to navigate this store and get to just the products I’m looking for.
The second way these shop sections will pay off is that the products in the “more from this shop” recommendations at the bottom of the page will be a lot more relevant to what I’m searching for.
If I am looking at a bracelet, and it is (of course) one of the products in the “bracelet” shop section, Etsy will show me more products from your bracelet section – and I will be much more likely to click one of those bracelets, and stay in your store!
When you create your shop sections you need to think like a buyer, not a seller,
Ask yourself “what might my customers search for?” and make a list— this will be much more valuable than if you, as a shop owner, think of logical categories that your products fit into like “made to order” or “resin creations” which won’t help your shoppers navigate your shop at all.
When your products are organized into sections that reflect the words and categories your customers will be searching for, the “more from this shop” product suggestions at the bottom of the page will show products that are very similar to their search, and you have a better chance of keeping them in your shop and not switching to a different one.
And those things will increase your shoppers and your sales, which is exactly what you want to do!
Remember that strategic and optimized shop sections not only help customers navigate and stay in your shop on Etsy, but they are ALSO used by search engines like Google which helps in displaying your listing in THEIR search results.
—so they can help you in multiple ways!
If you’re feeling a bit overwhelmed and would like some step by step help getting your Etsy shop all set up and optimized, we have a full module devoted entirely to shop optimization in the Tizzit HQ Etsy SEO course:
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This course walks you through what needs to be done to optimize SEO for your Etsy shop, including optimizing your shop and shop sections to get more shoppers, keep shoppers in your shop, and make more sales! But also of course finding and using the best keywords in your listings.
Thanks for reading, and until next time, au revoir!
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Thanks. Very helpful. I just went back and fine-tuned my shop sections.
Perhaps you can include in the article, directions as to how to get to the manage your shop sections. I didn’t even realize there was a manage section a few weeks ago and someone in a group mentioned it and I had to google how to get there.
I am finding so many basic customization features on Etsy that I didn’t realize existed.
Thank you for your comment, Sherrie! I am glad that you were able to fine-tune your shop sections.
That’s right, Deb teaches the foundational basics of organizing shop sections here to help with your shop’s marketing. Although Deb doesn’t give the step by step (which buttons to click, because Etsy features constantly change), the lessons in this article can still be used. You’ve definitely provided good feedback. We should point people to the wonderful Etsy Help Center for detailed How To instructions – here’s a link to help: https://help.etsy.com/hc/en-us/articles/360000345048-How-to-Create-and-Manage-Shop-Sections?segment=selling
Have a great day!