More Vintage than Art on Etsy

Vintage is now the third largest category of listings on Etsy, after Jewelry and Supplies - and both of those top two categories lost share in September.

Jewelry is still overwhelmingly the largest single Etsy category, with over 1.12 million listings as of October 14. Supplies is a distant second, with just over 595,000 listings as of October 14. In the past 60 days, Jewelry has dropped from 25.37% of the total listings to 24.72%, while Supplies has dropped from 13.41% of the total listings to 13.09%

Vintage, with 437,058 items listed as of October 14, grew from 9.04% of the total listings to 9.61%. Art, with 432,522 as of October 14, dropped from 9.91% of the total listings to 9.51% over the past 60 days.

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

Etsy Tracking Sources Updated

I have published the table showing Etsy's tracking sources that can be used to show you how people find your Etsy page from within Etsy into Google Docs:

Etsy tracking sources

You can watch a video walk-through on how to use these codes here:

Video Instructions

Internal Tracking with Etsy Stats

Readers of this blog may recall a post back in December about the extra code that Etsy places in links to your shop and your items that indicates where the link was found on the site. It seems this is in place for Etsy to track their internal traffic, but with the new integration of Google Analytics, you can use it to track internal Etsy traffic to your site. Here's how:

Each URL link to an item on Etsy has a little extra piece of referral code inserted that indicates where within Etsy the link appears. For instance, links that appear on search result pages have an sr in the URL, as in:

etsy.com/view_listing.php?ref=sr_list_1&listing_id=XXXXX

The term "list" in this URL means that the link was viewed in list mode (it might also say "gallery" if the link appears in gallery mode.) The number is the position on the page where the link appears. In this case, it's a "1" for the first, or top position.

These referral links show up in your Google Analytics reports in the "content" section. If you saw the link above, for instance, you would know that someone had found your item #XXXXX while searching in list mode, and that your item had appeared at the top of the page. Other codes indicate whether your visitor found your item from the front page, a showcase, a gift guide, the Storque, or through browsing categories. I have compiled a list of the various codes I have discovered in a Google doc for reference. These may change from time to time, and there may be other tracking referral codes I haven't found yet, so please let me know if it needs to be updated!

Updated 11/22/2009! Etsy Traffic Sources