Free Shipping on Etsy and SEO

free shipping etsy see Has your Etsy traffic decreased in the past year? Are you offering free shipping on Etsy? Are you offering fast shipping times? Many sellers quickly jump to the conclusion that it is an Etsy SEO issue with their listings, when it actually could be something else, such as offering free shipping and time to ship. So before you go and start tinkering with your titles and tags, read on first.

Offering Free Shipping on Etsy Helps SEO

About a year ago Etsy began to encourage sellers to offer free shipping at Etsy. With so many large retailers such as Amazon doing so, it seemed necessary to compete. Plus, shipping charges are the number one reason customers abandon their cart.

So, if your Etsy traffic has decreased this past year, and you do not offer free shipping, this could a possible cause. Let me explain. If I do a search on Etsy for “baby blankets” for example, a variety of listings come up, over 332,037 in fact. But, if I’m a shopper who cares about free shipping (any many do) I am then going to click on the filter on the left that says “Free Shipping” and now only those listings that offer free shipping will come up (down to 81,779). In other words, it is not an SEO issue at this point, it is a “features” issue. Big difference.

Now, there is a bit of a way around this. You do not have to offer free shipping on every individual product. If you set up a promotion that states, for example, “Free Shipping with $100 Purchase” this is enough for your listings to still show up in the filtered results. Either way I highly encourage you to offer free shipping with Etsy.

Offering Fast Shipping Times Helps Etsy SEO

Another important filter you may want to look at is the shipping time. The current Etsy search filters are “Ready to Ship in 1 Business Day” and “Ready to Ship in 3 Business Days”. Etsy would not have added these here unless they got feedback that these were also top reasons for cart abandonment.

Now, if you are selling gifts, this filter comes into play because a lot of gift buyers wait until the last minute. This is proven by Google search data. For example, Valentine’s Gift searches peak on February 10th and Mother’s Day gift searches peak on May 6th. I realize not everyone can offer this kind of turnaround, especially if products are personalized or made to order, but at least it helps you to realize that your problem may not be an SEO issue.

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