Etsy: Custom & Creative Goods 12+

I love Etsy shopping, but . . .

I am a huge Etsy fan and have been buying from them for years. I find the vendors to be honest and helpful, and the shipping is pretty quick. I have only had one shipping issue in my 25 years of shopping with Etsy, and the local post office paid for the damages. In general, I would say I am a customer who knows what she wants—almost always something interesting and unusual. Many of the vendors have worked with me—changing a color, a size, re-orienting a stone in a setting. They have done it all—several of them have accepted drawings from my daughter (an amateur artist) to make sure I got what I wanted.
My only real complaint about Etsy is that they do not sort things carefully. Sometimes I put something like “sterling bracelet with faceted black onyx “ in the search bar. What will show up is every bracelet—maybe the stone will be black onyx, but it might be any other color onyx comes in—with a black stone,onyx or not. There might be other colored stones in the bracelet as well, even though I did not ask for that. It might be costume, not sterling; or it might be gold. What is the point of a search bar if you are going to ignore what I asked for?!?

Recent formatting is super annoying

The app overall is very functional and good for shopping, but the amount of forced advertising sometimes makes me regret having it. I turned off all notifications because I couldn’t specify that it should notify me about shipping and DMs and not advertisements for item recommendations. The entire front page of the app consists of recommendations based on your history, which is fine, but now my updates tab (which is normally for sales, coupons, restocks, etc) gets cluttered constantly with MORE recommendations, and I can’t turn that off. And the search function is a joke compared to what it used to be, with only about 25% of the listing results actually being even vaguely related to my search words, and the rest being—you guessed it—recommendations based on what it thinks I might want instead of having anything to do with what I’m actually looking for. The constant hounding about leaving reviews for items is super annoying also, although I’m more sympathetic to that since shops do need reviews for their business. Still, annoying. Let me opt out of SOME of those reminders, at least.

Etsy is a business, I get it, but when you prioritize shoving recommendations down my throat to the point that it hinders app functionality, it’s awful. Trust your users to have the brainpower to look for what they want instead of needing it slammed in our faces on every single page.

Developer Response ,

Thanks so much for taking the time to share your feedback. We’re noting your feedback and will be sharing it with the team to consider for future updates. Please know we take comments from the community to heart, and we make many changes to the site based on what we hear.