Is Etsy Really About Supporting Its Sellers?: A Look at Web Analytics

Etsy is an e-commerce website full of different “shops” selling vintage, handcrafted, and other unique goods. Several years ago, many people were unaware of Etsy, which was founded in 2005. But according to Etsy’s About page, by the end of 2013, the quirky company boasted $1.35B in gross annual sales. It’s a continuously growing company that deploys “code about 40 times a day” according to engineer and CodeCraft blog contributor Jayson Paul (2015). And while not all 40 of those code changes will have a direct effect on sellers or shoppers, it’s obvious that Etsy is a company with huge analytics needs. A layer of complexity is added because Etsy has two sets of user types to satisfy, sellers and shoppers, each with different needs.

While most shoppers of Etsy think of the online marketplace as a sort of store, Etsy is very much a technology company. Just look at the positions for which they’re hiring. In a video interview, Etsy data engineer Steve Mardenfeld talks about how much their Amazon Web Services (AWS) influenced a major decision to formulate search returns in terms of relevancy rather than recency. Meaning, instead of a shopper seeing the most recent item related to his or her search by default, the shopper would now see the most relevant of the items listed across Etsy. The company’s engineers use Amazon’s “EMR [Elastic MapReduce] to spin off individual clusters where we run Hadoop applications to process and do analysis on our data, and we also use it for custom analysis and A/B testing. The big data analysis that we did allows us to determine whether a small change is better than the previous change. By running all these A/B tests we were able to safely make the switch from recency to relevancy, which improved our search experience and this was a major for Etsy. We safely made this change using data analytics we discovered from AWS,” said Mardenfeld. Another Etsy engineer explains, “Instead of trying to plan out everything we wanted to measure and putting it in a classical configuration management system, we decided to make it ridiculously simple for any engineer to get anything they can count or time into a graph with almost no effort. (And, because we can push code anytime, anywhere, it’s easy to deploy the code too, so we can go from “how often does X happen?” to a graph of X happening in about half an hour, if we want to)” (2011).

As a shopper on Etsy, I’d have to say, I am happy to report it would seem they have slowed down the number of visible changes that are made. For a while there, it seemed there was a new tweak every time I visited. Most of the time, I use the Etsy iPhone app. It is a clean, image-centric vertical scrolling app with essentially the same functionality as the website. A screenshot from my app below shows a menu, search, and cart in the header; home, featuring not only items and shops that I have marked as a favorite (which you do by clicking the heart) but also shops that I may be interested in because it sells items similar to others I have favorited; and next to Home is Trending, which Etsy developed just two years ago. The site and app are more clearly geared toward discovery now rather than straight search. This is in line with how Amazon and Pinterest work.

The most complete overhaul type change occurred when Etsy realized its categories were not serving sellers or shoppers. It’s clear that this was determined by user outcry and not web analytics. Etsy still offers a form for sellers to voice their opinion on improvements to the previously very confusing categories. In fact, outside of the company’s engineers, there isn’t much information about how Etsy analyzes web traffic from either sellers or shoppers. They do roll out changes quite often (check out the dates in the image below) and have many avenues of communication for its sellers.

SOURCE: Etsy

So let’s take a look at what Etsy does for its seller in terms of analytics. Etsy provides its own sort of “snapshot” analytics page called Shop Stats but it is a very high-level view that doesn’t allow for deeper observation. The Shop Stats dashboard includes data and graphs for views, favorites, orders, and revenue. The three other categories Shop Stats offers are traffic sources, top keywords, and most active. Etsy’s Help page explains these categories as:

Traffic Sources

• Overall: External sites that sent people to your shop
• Within Etsy: Sources from Etsy that sent people to your shop

Top Keywords

• Search terms people used to find your shop in search engines, including Etsy Search and Google

Most Active

• Pages Viewed: Pages within your shop with the most views
• Listing Favorites: Listings within your shop with the most favorites
• (Shop Stats do not display which specific pages send people to your shop)

That’s all of it… Right away, you can see there are some holes in the information one could glean from Shop Stats. MRKT blog owner Matthew Deal puts it bluntly: As a seller, you have all the pressures of a normal e-commerce website, but only half of the tools to do something about it (2014). Some sellers are actually making their living from their Etsy stores so those stats would not cut it. But sellers can also track their shops in Google Analytics. “Unlike Pageviews in Google Analytics, Views are the “cumulative number of views for your item from the moment the item was listed on the site,” which means they’re not accurate for a given period of time; this is the equivalent of calculating your college grades based on cumulative scores from a test on shapes you did in the 2nd grade” (Deal). An ad as a traffic source gets lost on Shop Stats if the shopper clicks any other area of your shop or in Etsy at all; Shop Stats then considers the traffic source as Etsy itself. That doesn’t serve the seller, it serves Etsy. 

SOURCE: Handmadeology

But Etsy’s Help page explains: With traffic sources, Shop Stats shows how people found your shop and Google Analytics shows how people found Etsy. Well, you’d want to know how people found your shop, I would think. No matter which company is telling “the truth,” it seems to behoove sellers to get GA, right? Well, Deal says, “Google Analytics Goals, traditionally the easiest way to record sales, are inert in Etsy along with any functions related Analytics’ e-commerce functionality” (2014). So sellers cannot create custom reports or segments. GA will provide more in-depth and accurate visitor information.

In the Community Questions forum, seller Janne Perry says: The one big thing that GA shows me is that browsing with mobile/handheld devices has risen steeply in the last year or so. Those views account for about 40% of my views and I now make sure that the most important part of my description is right at the top to accommodate the limited size viewing screen.

Either way, Etsy is not going to be able to sufficiently increase your traffic no matter how much they change their site to highlight and categorize; the relevancy and tagging features definitely help. In the end though, it’s likely what you do outside of Etsy that will make the biggest difference and for those moves, Google Analytics will be your better friend. Social media, blogging, guest posting, link building, comment, engage. And most of all, keep creating.