Etsy acknowledged some technical issues that began on Thursday that impacted its browse function, and it experienced a brief site outage on Monday morning. A spokesperson told EcommerceBytes the two events were unrelated.
Users said they noticed that beginning on the afternoon of March 5th, Etsy search results changed significantly. A seller posted on Ecommerce EKG, “Established successful selling shops have disappeared from most search results using search box,” and, they wrote, “Shops which were previously unknown or extremely far back in search results have now taken over all pages of search.”
On the Etsy boards, some sellers said the issue was related to the new categoriesEtsy had rolled out.
Etsy spokesperson Nikki Summer told EcommerceBytes the company was aware of the problem and said it had been working to fix it. “We hope to have everything resolved by late Monday,” and she referred us to this post on the Etsy discussion boards.
In that post, Etsy denied that listings with new categories were being penalized in search. “If, however, your item received a large amount of traffic directly from a keyword that only appeared in your category (and not your tags or title), you may see a shift in views after removing that category. If this is the case in your shop, consider adding that term as a tag.”
Etsy did acknowledge issues with browse in the post – be sure to read the full post if you are experiencing problems. The thread itself had grown to 35 pages by Monday evening.
Summer explained on Monday afternoon, “There have been some bugs related to Browse, and we’re working on patching them. Since we are also always working to improve rankings, it’s hard to know exactly what users were seeing. Everything should be fixed soon.”
While some sellers reported things were back to normal for their listings on Monday evening, others remained concerned about the visibility of their listings.
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