Seller Handbook

The following is a transcript of a podcast episode released in November 2021. The transcript has been edited slightly for this format. You can listen to the episode on Apple Podcasts, SoundCloud, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. Or stream it via the Spotify player above.

Tess: Hi, everyone. I have Jake on the line from San Francisco. How’s it going, Jake?

Jake: Hi, Tess, I'm doing well. Thanks for having me.

Tess: Thanks for being here. Can you first start by telling me a little bit about what you and your team do at Etsy?

Jake: Sure, I'm the vice president of Global Fulfillment at Etsy. In practice, my team oversees the technology and operations that ensure Etsy buyers know what to expect about how and when their orders will be fulfilled. We also build tools for sellers to reliably fulfill their orders. On the seller side, the tools my team builds run the gamut from order management solutions to shipping solutions, among many others.

Tess: I’d love to talk about some of the shipping best practices that you’d recommend as the expert in this area, especially during this busy shopping season. Let’s go over what estimated delivery dates are because I’ve heard that those are pretty important.

Jake: Definitely. Estimated delivery dates are a pretty critical piece of information for buyers in terms of when they can expect their order to arrive, and it’s a very common data point across ecommerce sites. On Etsy, sellers may recognize that estimated delivery date as the date range they see on their listing page, showing the future date a buyer would expect to get that item if the buyer was to order that day.

To understand how Etsy generates that date, it may be helpful to think about the general steps that are taken to fulfill an order. So it’s really a two-step process. The first step is the seller receives an order after the buyer places it to begin processing. That can mean creating the item, packaging it, and shipping it out.

The second step is that order being received by the carrier. Once the carrier receives it, they start transiting it and eventually deliver it to the buyer. When Etsy calculates an estimated delivery date, we’re essentially adding together the seller-provided processing time and the carrier’s estimated transit time.

Tess: For those of us who are less familiar with this concept, could you share an example so we can get a sense of how this looks in action?

Jake: Sure. If a seller sets up an order processing time of three to five days and a carrier has an estimated transit time of two to four days, then Etsy would essentially add those two values together to show buyers an estimated delivery date that’s five to nine days away. So that’s three to five business days plus two to four days, which equals five to nine days away.

Tess: Why should sellers care about estimated delivery dates, in your opinion?

Jake: Estimated delivery dates are important for sellers as well as buyers, as I was alluding to before. I’ll start on the buyer side. It gives buyers confidence when they’re making a purchase. Internally we’ve done research that indicates that when a buyer knows when an item is going to arrive, it’s one of the key points in their decision-making process.

And because of that, estimated delivery dates are also important for sellers because it reduces the volume of the messages that they may receive from buyers. If a buyer places an order on a listing that doesn’t have an estimated delivery date, they’re more likely to reach out to the seller to ask them, “When is the order going to arrive?” or “Where is the order in terms of being processed?” This is certainly a benefit to sellers and it’s something they should probably think about as we head into the holiday season.

Tess: That does sound really helpful especially during this busier time of year. What do sellers need to do in order to make sure that an estimated delivery date will show up on their listings?

Jake: Yeah, they’re really helpful data points for buyers and they’re really easy to set up as well. Etsy essentially needs three inputs from the seller to create these dates on the listing page. First, we need sellers to define the listing’s processing time. That’s the number of business days the seller expects it will take to create an item, package it, and hand it off to a carrier.

Another data point is the carrier transit time. The easiest way for a seller to provide us with that information is to define the carrier and mail class they’re expecting to use when they ultimately ship the item. And when Etsy gets that information, we use that to look up the carrier’s estimated transit time. Based on the carrier and the mail class that’s being used, we reference carrier transit timetables.

And the final input, which applies primarily to US sellers at the moment, is the zip code from which the seller is shipping from. When sellers add the zip code that they’re shipping from, it allows our estimated delivery dates to be more accurate. An example might be helpful: If a seller is shipping from New York to California, we’ll expect that to take more time than if they’re shipping from New York to a buyer who’s also located in New York state.

Tess: You’ve talked a bit about processing time already, and I imagine that timing could change when a seller experiences an increase in their order volume. I'm wondering what tips you might have about how sellers should approach their processing times during the holidays?

Jake: That’s very true. When sellers expect higher order volumes like during the holiday season, we recommend that they consider how these volumes will impact their ability to ship their orders on time. Shipping on time essentially means to ship their orders within the stated processing times that they’ve set up.

There are a few things for sellers to keep in mind about this. The first is that they should review processing times on each of their listings to be sure they’re accounting for the end-to-end time that it takes to process an order. So that’s from making an item to packaging it, all the way to handing it off to the carrier.

And then during the holidays, they should make sure that they’re handing their orders to the carriers on or before the last day of their processing time, because that’s the date it’s expected the carrier will take possession of the order. If the carrier gets possession of the order after that date, it may arrive later than the estimated delivery date that the buyer saw when they made their purchase.

One other tip that I would mention is that sellers should always remember to mark their orders as complete only after they’ve handed their orders off to the carrier, because this will allow the buyer to know the date that the package actually got put into the mail. And if there’s a tracking number, they can start expecting to see tracking events.

Tess: Got it. So sellers should review the processing times as they consider the time it takes to fulfill one quantity of a listing, but what if they have multiple quantities?

Jake: Yeah, that’s a really good question and something that sellers should be thinking a lot about. We can think about processing times and listing quantities as codependent in a sense. What I mean by that is if a seller has a listing quantity of two and they know they can make and ship both of those quantities within four days, then setting a four-day processing time makes sense. But if it takes that same four days to make and ship just one quantity, then the seller should consider either listing one quantity at a time or reconsidering their processing times to account for a situation in which they get multiple orders.

Some sellers may also be thinking as they head into holidays about having more inventory that’s ready to ship, meaning they’re not going to be making the items. They already have the inventory on hand. This may allow those sellers to keep some shorter processing times. And that’s because if the inventory is already created, then the seller’s processing times that are loaded into the system only reflect the time it’s going to take to package the item and hand it off to the carrier.

Tess: That sounds like a smart move. What about as the season goes on? Should sellers be making any changes throughout the holidays?

Jake: Yes, actually. It’s important for sellers to continue to monitor their order volumes and their ability to ship on time throughout the entire holiday season. During the holidays, they should be looking at their processing times. Then after the holidays, it’s also important for the sellers to go back and revisit any adjustments that they’ve made because they could’ve been calibrating their processing times for holiday orders. When they come out of the holiday season and see a decline in order volumes, it’s important to recalibrate processing times for off-peak order volumes.

Tess: Yeah, this is really important and I'm glad you’re here talking about this because I know that, especially if this is a seller’s first holiday season, they don't really have previous data points to inform their strategy.

OK, what about if a seller feels like they’re starting to get behind on their orders? What should they do then?

Jake: When sellers are getting behind on orders, that usually means that they have too many orders to process and ship on time. And as I’ve been mentioning, that’s something we really want to avoid because on-time shipping is such an essential part of an order arriving to the buyer by the estimated delivery date.

To help with this, earlier this year we launched a new dashboard that shows sellers what orders need to ship, and the date by which they need to ship them. It’s sorted by the order’s due date, meaning the dates that we would need the orders to get to the carrier. Sellers can see this data on their Shop Manager dashboard. We created this because we know how important on-time shipping is to the end buyer experience, and this is also why on-time shipping was added as one of the criteria for the new Star Seller program.

Tess: Yes and if you’re not familiar, we launched the Star Seller program earlier this year as a way to recognize sellers with a proven record of providing a great customer experience. I think the best part of earning a Star Seller badge right now is that it can help buyers feel more confident purchasing from you, and we all know how important that is during the holiday season.

OK, what else can sellers do if they’re falling behind and not shipping orders on time?

Jake: One option for them is to extend their processing times, which we’ve been talking a little bit about so far. And this will create some additional time for them when they’re processing new orders. So a new order that gets placed with a longer processing time gives the seller more time before they have to ship it out. And that can carve out some breathing room for sellers to work through their backlog of existing orders, but that’s not always the best solution.

If a seller is really stuck, then they can also use vacation mode. For anyone who’s unfamiliar, vacation mode effectively puts a hold on all new orders from being placed to a seller’s shop. By stopping new orders from being placed, a seller can focus exclusively on working through the backlog of existing orders that they have. It’s really easy for a seller to put their shop on a temporary hold via vacation mode until they’re caught up, and then re-enable their shop to receive orders again.

Tess: Is there anything else a seller should do concerning the orders that they’re already behind on?

Jake: Yeah, I think the one other piece of guidance that we would give them is to keep the buyer experience in mind. Communication with buyers goes a long way. It’s a really good practice for sellers to proactively message buyers about any backlog situations. If you have clear signs as a seller that you’re at risk or already are beginning to ship late, we would recommend that you share that information with your buyers so that they’re kept up to speed on how things are evolving.

Tess: Definitely. Communication is always important, but it can make a huge difference during this time of year. OK, so far we’ve talked about setting accurate processing times and earlier you also mentioned transit times being important for getting an accurate estimated delivery date. What do sellers need to know about managing transit times accurately during the holidays?

Jake: Yes, having accurate transit times is also really important because it’s the other half of the estimated delivery date. But this is a place where Etsy can really step in and play a bigger role to support sellers in communicating up-to-date transit time estimates. If I'm thinking back to last year, I'm sure many sellers remember how delayed carrier networks became. When this happens, we know that it can be challenging for sellers to gauge how to communicate those types of delays with their buyers. This is where Etsy can help.

We’re able to adjust transit times for sellers when carriers have informed us that they’re experiencing delays, or based off of an internal review of data that we do. We can do this for a few reasons. For one, we have close partnerships with carriers and during the holidays we’re frequently in conversation with them about how their networks are performing. We’ve also developed in-house technology that allows us to analyze millions of data points on packages to detect where carriers may be seeing delays forming in their networks. Then we can make adjustments to our transit time estimates to make sure we’re keeping those estimates accurate.

Tess: Do sellers need to do anything on their end to make sure that Etsy can do this if an order gets delayed?

Jake: Yes, actually. In order for Etsy to manage transit times in the way that I was just describing, sellers will need to select one of the carriers available in our drop-down list in their [shipping] profiles. For instance, if a seller in the US is shipping with USPS, they should be sure to select USPS in that dropdown list. Without this type of structured information about how the seller is planning to ship, Etsy won't know what transit time adjustments to make in order to keep their estimated delivery dates accurate.

Etsy can support sellers in other ways as well beyond just making adjustments to transit times. For instance, when we’re informed of carrier delays, we can add carrier delay messaging to the website to inform buyers of these types of conditions. We also have, in the past, used language updates in our transaction emails to communicate that carriers are being delayed and to potentially expect that in the buyer experience.

Tess: OK, now let’s talk about shipping labels. I know that purchasing them through Etsy can help sellers save time and sometimes money, which is an awesome perk. Are there any other benefits to buying shipping labels on Etsy?

Jake: Yes, you’re right. Most of the time purchasing labels on Etsy offers sellers better rates than they can get directly from a carrier. US sellers, for example, have access to discounted rates with USPS and FedEx when they purchase labels through Etsy. So price point is an important consideration, but there are other advantages as well. Purchasing labels through Etsy can also tie sellers into unique carrier capabilities. For instance, in the US a seller can schedule a free pick-up for their orders, saving them a trip to the post office.

Purchasing labels through Etsy can also make their life easier in terms of fulfilling their orders. One example of that is if a tracking number exists on a label that’s purchased through Etsy, it’s automatically paired to the order and shared with buyers. And sellers should remember that when they purchase a label on Etsy with tracking, it automatically counts toward their Star Seller shipping and tracking stats.

And when you purchase a label on Etsy, all of the data required for the label gets prepopulated for the seller. This can be really useful for sellers when purchasing labels for cross-border shipping. In that case, Etsy will suggest and populate the customs forms required for sellers for their approval. And when they do approve, we’ll send them directly to the carriers to correctly handle the duties and taxes.

Tess: There are always last-minute shoppers who are willing to pay a little more to get their order faster—We’ve all been there, especially around the holidays. How can sellers accommodate those needs to reach even more potential customers?

Jake: That’s true and I'm one of those shoppers so I can definitely relate. One clear thing a seller can do to support buyers like myself is to add carrier upgrade options to their shipping profiles or listings. This gives buyers the option to pay for faster delivery speeds if they’re looking for a last-minute gift.

Tess: Yeah, that’s a great idea. I think it’s especially helpful on Etsy since there are so many one-of-a-kind items. It makes sense that a shopper would be willing to pay a little more to get something that they know they truly can't get anywhere else.

Next, I'm wondering what you’d recommend sellers do to provide a great customer service experience to their buyers right now?

Jake: We’ve talked about a good number of them. On-time shipping is really important, and the other that I might mention right now is having tracking, which I alluded to before. Adding tracking numbers is really beneficial to the buyer experience. It’s a good practice because it gives buyers visibility to their order’s transit status. And for sellers, that typically means fewer questions coming from buyers about where their order is.

Also for any sellers who are buying their postage directly from a carrier, we recommend that after you’ve gone to the carrier and purchased your label, you add the tracking number to the order after it’s been shipped.

Tess: Yeah, tracking numbers are really crucial. I know that my anxious brain really appreciates being able to check in on the status of orders, especially when I'm trying to ship something in time for a holiday.

Jake: Yeah, and another way to provide assurance for anxious people like ourselves as a seller is to purchase delivery insurance on their shipments. When a seller is purchasing labels on Etsy, they’re able to select an option to add insurance. They can determine the value they want to insure for that order during the transiting of that parcel to the buyer.

Tess: Thank you for answering all of my questions, Jake. Now it’s time for our lightning round where we’ve collected questions for you from sellers in the Etsy Forums.

First up is Costume Couture Naomi, who has a few questions. They say, “How does Etsy help support and accommodate sellers whose items are shipped with plenty of time but end up stuck in a sorting center for weeks? How can Etsy help streamline the tracking process, support sellers so they can provide the right customer service for their customers, and help sellers who may receive negative reviews, cases, and chargebacks due to USPS and other shipping issues?”

Jake: With regard to the carrier issues that are outside of the seller’s control, sellers have the option to flag reviews that they believe are in violation of our reviews policy. We have a team that’s responsible for reviewing these requests and taking those reviews out as appropriate. So if a review is only about a delay and you shipped the order on time and purchased a label on Etsy, there’s a good chance that Etsy may remove that review. But these are nuanced decisions, which is why every single request is reviewed by an agent who makes the decision based on the policies and decides on a case-by-case basis.

When it comes to streamlining the tracking process, we recommend that you ship with a tracking number. I mentioned this earlier, but it’s also useful for any non-delivery cases that are opened against a seller's shop. Orders that are $10 or more will automatically be closed when you provide a tracking number that shows the order was delivered to the buyer.

And lastly, in terms of USPS delays, as I mentioned previously, Etsy has several mechanisms to alert buyers when we’ve been informed that carriers are going to be delayed. I mentioned a few of these, like how we’ll adjust transit time estimates and how we can message delays to buyers through different points in the customer journey.

Tess: Art by Inky says, “How can Etsy sellers prepare for the influx of holiday orders given the recent changes to USPS? Should there be a specific date that we cut off orders so buyers can be guaranteed delivery before the holidays?” And we actually got another question from Expressive Wonders, who was also asking if we can suggest a timeline to tell customers when to order by.

Jake: With respect to carrier delays, I’ve mentioned today some of the ways Etsy’s planning to step in and support sellers with buyer messaging and dynamically adjusting transit times. In terms of the cutoff dates, USPS and other carriers do publish guidance on when they need to receive parcels by in order to deliver them within the holiday timeframes. We published these dates in a Seller Handbook article.

I would recommend for sellers to provide all the necessary inputs for estimated delivery dates so buyers know when to expect their order during the holidays. And consider offering shipping upgrades, particularly for those last-minute shoppers who are willing to pay a little bit more to have faster delivery speeds.

Tess: Confetti Candle Co asks, “I want to know about packaging. For the holidays, I’d love to offer gift packaging that everyone loves. What are the preferred options? Sustainability is really important to me. So far I’ve been looking at reusable fabric wrap and 100% recycled tissue paper.”

Jake: Well, that’s great to hear. Sustainability is really important for Etsy as well. When it comes to sustainable packaging for gifts, we can recommend a few things. We suggest offering 100% recycled or FSC-certified paper bags. And when buying gift bags, look for the ones with twisted paper handles rather than rope or ribbon, because that typically will make them 100% recyclable. Also avoid shredded crinkle paper or foil as it’s likely to be too small to be recycled.

I also noticed the seller is located in the US, so I’d recommend checking out Etsy’s new Planet-Friendly Packaging. We recently partnered with EcoEnclose to offer US sellers packaging made from 100% recycled materials or certified responsibly sourced paper.

Tess: Belgian Paperworks says, “I'm seeing buyers place an order and qualify for free shipping, then immediately place several additional small orders and paying for shipping on those. I’d like to combine their orders into a single package to save them money and refund any shipping overage, but I would not have a tracking number for each separate order and my Star Seller rating would be impacted. How can I combine shipping to offer top customer service without risking my shop’s Star Seller badge?”

Jake: Wow, I really admire the thoughtfulness of that question and I'm sure your customers appreciate it too. There’s a way to avoid impacting your Star Seller rating for the use case you’re describing. You can use the original tracking number—the one you created for the buyer’s initial order—and enter it for the additional small orders which you’re placing into the same, single package. And that practice won't affect your Star Seller rating.

Tess: Skyline Fever asks, “Would offering free shipping during the holidays increase sales or is just running sales a better way to go? It’s hard to decide because I don't want to increase prices to offset shipping, but I’d really like to increase sales at this time.”

Jake: Based on our research, we believe that buyers prioritize purchases with free shipping and prefer to pay for a higher cost product that includes free shipping versus the alternative. One thing you might try if you’re feeling unsure is running a free standard shipping sale to test it out with your own customers.

Tess: Our final questions come from Pure Prana Label, who says, “Is Etsy running a campaign this year to make people aware of early holiday shipping? And if so, how is Etsy going to include worldwide purchasing in the campaign, making them aware that the treasure they’re searching for comes with longer delivery times?”

Jake: This year we kicked off our holiday season earlier than we ever have, starting with our Labor Day sales event in September which offered early season discounts ahead of the peak holiday timing. Since then, we’ve launched a number of initiatives aimed at encouraging buyers to shop earlier in the holiday season.

In late September, we launched our first-ever Etsy House, which I think is really cool. It’s a 360 degree virtual experience, highlighting 100 of our favorite Etsy items to inspire holiday shopping. We also prioritized some key holiday items in October—such as our two-day ornament flash sale and advent calendar features—to encourage early holiday spending on the staples that buyers are typically looking for during this time of year.