- 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 up your shop for success.
And 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 came 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 why are shop sections so important?
Well, your shop sections can make a big difference
between a shopper staying in your shop
and browsing through multiple of your own product listings
or clicking off your shop and onto another seller's
after the first listing,
which is not that good, right?
So, once you've done the work of bringing them
to your listing with SEO and marketing,
we want them to keep browsing your products.
And so 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 video.
Ready?
Let's dive in.
(gentle music)
Bonjour, my name is Deb and I'm the founder of Tizzit.co,
a membership community for makers and handmade shop owners,
just like your fabulous self.
You can learn more about our community, Tizzit HQ,
via the link that I'll put just below this video
but for now, let's jump straight into today's conversation,
setting up sections for your Etsy shop.
When you're setting up your 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 organised
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 shows up in the search results,
at the bottom of that listing,
Etsy will also 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 someone else'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,
this super cute and adorable set of miniature apple earrings
from a shop called Sol's Creations.
And actually, if you love miniature food items,
go check out her store because her products are adorable
and super realistic.
I love them.
But anyway, let's say that for some reason,
these earrings aren't quite what I had in mind,
I don't know why it wouldn't
because these are freaking adorable
but let's just imagine to go along with this example,
or say that I'm simply browsing at this stage on Etsy
and still a bit undecided as to exactly what it is I want.
So I scroll down the page on that listing
and stumble across the More from this shop section
to see if this handmade shop has other earrings
that I might want to consider.
Unfortunately here, there aren't a lot of products
to 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?
It's 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 two 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.
And 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'm 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 likely 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 jewellery
which is most likely what I'm looking for,
considering what I searched initially.
Let me show you another example
and an example of what happens
when shop sections are optimised strategically.
In this example, I searched for 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
from this shop.
Different colours, thicknesses, and other variations
that I might like and I might click on.
This shop owner has done a really good job
defining their shop sections strategically for that,
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 Etsy's picked up that's what I'm looking at.
But it kind of at least levels the playing field
and increases the chances that I actually stay in that 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.
Yarn craft accessories, resin creations,
and then 16, eight, and four ply yarns.
So there are five sections in all.
And 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'm gonna find
in some of those sections if click on them.
Another little red flag I'm seeing is
that 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 bar
for all things made of resin.
They will be looking for a product first,
for example, a ring or earrings,
and 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 just go on Etsy thinking,
"Today, I'm going to buy something made of resin."
To me, and I might be wrong,
but the resin creation section feels like
it was just created to bundle everything
that isn't yarn, essentially.
And even though all the products grouped
under resin creations aren't yarn,
if you click on resin creation,
there's a lot of different things in there,
it's a bit of mixed bag,
it doesn't really narrow down your product choices much.
When I clicked, I found keyrings, a bit of jewellery,
some cheese and charcuterie boards.
And yes, they're all beautiful and made of 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
under that section.
Because the shop categorised all these products
under resin products, and not a specific category
that I'm looking for like jewellery or keyrings.
And if I click on one of this seller's products,
it will unfortunately also 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 keyring.
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 been something,
like keyrings for one, and then jewellery and other,
and then cheese and charcuterie boards and other.
Here is another example I want to show you
of sections that are not really, well optimised.
This shop has two sections, ready made and made to order.
Nothing wrong per se,
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,
zodiac and gift ideas.
This makes a lot of sense for me as a customer
because if I'm looking for a bracelet,
I'm just gonna go and click on bracelets.
If I'm looking for a necklace,
I have a choice of either bar necklaces
and chains and chokers.
And if I'm not into chokers,
I feel pretty 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 really make it easy for me
to navigate this store and get to just the products
I'm actually 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 each listing would be a lot more relevant
to what I'm searching for.
If I'm 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
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
as well as they could.
When your products are organised into sections
that reflect the words and categories
that your customers have in mind and will be searching for,
the More from this shop product suggestions
at the bottom of the page will also 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 do add up
and really help increase your sales,
which is exactly what you want, right?
So remember that strategic
and optimised 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 many, many ways.
If you're feeling a bit overwhelmed
and would like some step by step help,
getting your shop all set up and optimised,
we have a full module called Etsy Shop Tune Up
devoted entirely to shop optimization
in the Tizzit HQ Etsy SEO course,
you can click the link below this video
to learn more about it.
This course walks you through what needs to be done
to optimise SEO for your Etsy shop,
including optimising 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, including how to research them
and pick the best ones to boost your views and sales.
I will put the link down below.
Make sure to check it out.
Thanks for watching and until next time, au revoir.