Your Etsy shop quality rating is one of the measures Etsy uses to determine where you are in the search results.
Etsy is the only one who really knows how your Etsy shop’s quality rating is both calculated and used. But, what we do know is that the Etsy Shop Quality rating takes into account intangible factors like your Customer Service Performance, Order Dissatisfaction Rate (ODR), and Bounce Rate.
Obviously, sales are king. If your products are selling, then Etsy will continue to show them. This is the number one factor that will place your products high up in the search results. So make sure you watch your conversion rate. Tweak your products to ensure that the number of sales per visit is high. Tips are found here.
Not only do you need to create products that sell (see here for advice on that), you also need to work on your intangible factors.
Improve your Etsy Shop quality rating
It goes without saying that your customer service needs to be on-point. That means you must reply promptly to customer queries, ship products on time and make sure your items are described accurately. This should avoid poor reviews that will impact your ODR.
While you can’t stop a customer from leaving a poor review, you are in full control of how you deal with it. You should always deal with them respectfully, even if the customer has been less than respectful about you or your products. Remember your response is not for the person who left the review, it is for everyone who reads the review in the future. They want to see that your behaviour is in keeping with someone they want to buy from.
Treat poor reviews as a learning experience. Do everything within your power to ensure the same issue doesn’t happen again.
What is the Bounce Rate?
To bounce from a website is to leave it before interacting with the site in any way.
To improve your Etsy shop quality rating, you need any customers that click into your products to stay as long as possible. This can mean them lingering on your product or within your shop.
The longer a visitor stays on your product, or other pages in your shop, the better the Bounce Rate.
If a customer clicks on your product and then leaves straight away, this increases your Bounce Rate. If a visitor does this, it tells Etsy that they didn’t like your product, or it wasn’t relevant. This is then taken into account the next time someone does a similar search.
This is not good.
The lower the Bounce Rate, the better.
This applies to both your shop and your products.
To have a low Bounce Rate, you need to keep visitors in your shop longer.
How to improve your Bounce Rate
Here are some tips to keep people in your products and moving around your shop longer:
- Make your product descriptions are enticing using all the physiological tips we discussed here.
- Write longer descriptions to keep the visitor scrolling through the product. Make sure you detail the benefits and then the features of your products.
- Use all 10 of your photos. This gives the visitor something to flick through and look at. If you are struggling with ideas on what to use, some of your photos could be reviews, colour charts, customer pictures, etc.
- Add links to other related listings. If the visitor doesn’t quite like that product, give them an option to look at an alternative. Think about using the same item but in a different colour, or sets including the item or a slightly different design.
- Add links to your shop sections. Instead of linking to specific products include the URL for one of your shop sections.
- Add links to search terms within your shop based on the product.
While it is valuable to include links to some of your other products, don’t overdo it. If your description is a long list of other products, then the visitor might wonder why to bother buying this product.
Making sure your Etsy Shop Quality rating is the best it can be will help you rank better in its search results. So if you needed a good reason to review your product descriptions, then this is it. And while you are doing it, why not take a look at this template for writing product descriptions so that you include everything that is going to help you.
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