As you may have seen on the homepage or heard about in our News post, we’ve launched two new shopping experiences to Etsy members today: Etsy Weddings and Wedding Registry. As with all new features, we’re sure you have some questions about how you can participate. In this post, I’ll walk you through what Etsy Weddings and Registries mean for sellers.
Etsy Weddings
Etsy Weddings is a destination of wedding items, trends, how-to’s, expert advice and the stories of real couples — all in one place. Items featured will change frequently to represent trends in the Etsy marketplace and beyond. Like our weekly emails, Etsy Weddings is a new way for shoppers to explore a wide range of products on Etsy when they may not have a specific item in mind. If shoppers are inspired by what they see, searching on Etsy will deliver results from across the entire marketplace, like it does today.
Etsy Weddings will replace the previous weddings category and subcategories, thus removing Showcase. As we look to make further developments we’ll explore opportunities for sellers interested in promoting their items to this audience.
We’re also taking what we’ve learned from Search, that relevancy is a better experience for buyers, and applying a similar concept to the weddings category. This means the order for any items within the shoppings pages of Etsy Weddings (like this veils page) will rely on relevancy. Relevancy factors are based on multiple, relevant search results and aggregate shopping and browsing behavior. Provided you are optimizing your listings for search sorted by relevancy, there’s nothing different you need to do to for your items to be eligible to show in Etsy Weddings. Make sure your titles and descriptions use shopper-friendly keywords and accurate and descriptive phrases.
There are some hand-picked items featured on Etsy Weddings and as with all curated experiences, we try to feature as many shops, styles and regions as possible in our hunt for unique items. One tip to boost your results are displaying clear beautiful product photos, available in high resolution. If you haven’t already, take a look at our photography video or learn more about working with models. This is especially relevant to those of you selling weddings accessories and apparel. Customers want to imagine how your items will look on them, on their big day, so give them some examples!
Etsy Weddings is a way for us to introduce a great segment of new women and men to Etsy while they’re planning their weddings. To this end, we’ll be doing some advertising and we hope to bring in fresh shoppers from this demographic.
Wedding Registry
To accompany the experience of shopping for the big day, we’re inviting brides and grooms to register for wedding gifts on Etsy!
To help couples start exploring items after they create their Wedding Registry, we’ve included a wide variety of gift ideas on the registry page. In addition, once a member has created a registry, they will see the “Add to Registry” button below “Add to Cart” across Etsy, allowing them to add any item from our marketplace.
So what can you do? As with Etsy Weddings, optimizing your listings for relevancy will help your item to be eligible to show in the registry gift ideas. In addition, make sure to list your true quantity of items for sale so that registrants can request more than one of your item. Be clear in your listing about any additional steps you’ll need buyers to take for registry items. For example, do you want to recommend they leave a note to the couple in the “Note to Seller” section, or remind the purchaser to specify personalization details, such as color or initials?
For now, you will not be alerted if your item is added to a registry, but you’ll be able to see Registries as a traffic referrer in Shop Stats. If you’re noticing a lot of referral traffic from this source you may want to consider increasing your quantity since sold out listings cannot be added to registries. In addition, your order page will reflect whether a purchase was made from a registry.
Both Weddings and Registries will be accounted for in your Shop Stats and we hope you’ll see that these new parts of the site contribute to your shop’s success! We’ll continue to post more tips here for those of you who are selling wedding-related items in the coming weeks, and be sure to check out Etsy’s Guide to Running an Online Wedding Biz for advice from the community.
Have questions or want to share your wedding marketing expertise? Check out the Etsy Forums.
