Etsy Trends - Categories

The jewelry category has actually shrunk over the past two years when expressed as a percentage of Etsy's total listings, while vintage and supplies have taken a larger share. The art category, which is also among the top 5 categories in terms of size, has lost share. Accessories, the 5th largest single category, has dropped slightly in its share of listings.

In mid 2007, the jewelry category made up about one third of all Etsy listings. Today, it makes up about one quarter. In the meantime, the vintage category has grown from about 2% of total listings in 2007 to about 9% today. Supplies now make up over 13% of the active listings, up from about 9.5% in 2007, swapping places with the art category which made up nearly 13% of the listings in 2007 and is at about 10% now. Accessories have stayed fairly steady at between 6-7% of the total listings, with a slight drop over the past two years.




So what do these shifts in categories mean? That's hard to say exactly without any category-specific sales figures from Etsy. An increase in the number of listings could signal a drop in sales from that category, but this is not necessarily the case, as the supplies category continues to grow despite being perhaps the busiest single category - on a recent one-day survey, I estimated over 14,000 sales from the supplies category. That would represent about half the sales of an average Etsy day in July.

Here is a complete chart showing the changes in all 31 categories between mid-2007 and August, 2009