The 30-Point Etsy Shop Audit (Free Checklist)

Etsy has a page that lists what is wrong with your listings — image resolution, an unclear first photo, a vague category, a missing return policy — and clears each item within 24 hours of you fixing it. Most sellers have never opened it. This audit starts there, then covers the twenty-seven things that page does not check.

Where these numbers come from

Every threshold below is Etsy’s own published figure, read on 14 September 2026 from Etsy’s Help pages and Seller Handbook. Nothing here is a guess about the algorithm, and nothing is copied from another blog’s checklist.

I do not sell on Etsy and cannot — Etsy Payments does not operate in Bangladesh. I run a silver jewelry shop on my own store instead. So this is an audit built from Etsy’s published rules and from public listings anyone can inspect, not from a screenshot of my own dashboard.

First: open the page Etsy already wrote for you

Shop Manager has a Search Visibility page at etsy.com/your/shops/me/search-visibility. Etsy describes it as “personalized shop insights and actions that can help how you show up in search”, and it checks three areas: your listings, your shop, and your customer service. Fixes typically clear from it within 24 hours.

1. Open Search Visibility and write down every flagged listing. It surfaces low image resolution, an unclear primary photo, vague categorisation, missing return policies and shipping costs. This is Etsy telling you what it dislikes, in Etsy’s own words.
2. Use the “Search factors” filter on your Listings page. It filters your whole catalogue by search-visibility issue, which is faster than opening listings one at a time.
3. Fix the flagged items before anything else in this list. These are the only points where Etsy has explicitly told you the problem. Everything after this is inference.

The two bars Etsy measures you against

Every checklist online audits you against Star Seller. Star Seller is a badge. The bar that actually affects whether you are shown at all is called Customer Service Standards, its numbers are lower, and Etsy says plainly that falling below it risks “lowering your search visibility” and, for repeated case-rate failures, “temporary or permanent suspension of your selling privileges”.

Metric	Customer Service Standards (the floor)	Star Seller (the badge)
Message response	80% of first messages within 48 hours	95% of first messages within 24 hours
On-time shipping	80% of orders	95%, with valid tracking or an Etsy label
Reviews	Under 40 reviews: no more than 4 at 3 stars or less. 40+: under 10% at 3 stars or less	Average rating 4.8+
Cases	Under 300 orders: no more than 3 refunded cases. 300+: under 1%	Not a Star Seller metric
Who it applies to	Every shop	90 days after your first sale, and 5+ orders and $300+ in sales over 3 months
Reviewed	Monthly on the 1st; progress updates every 24 hours	Monthly on the 1st, on the previous 3 months

4. Check your message response rate against 80% / 48 hours first, not 95% / 24. If you are under the floor, the badge is irrelevant.
5. Count your cases, not just your reviews. Under 300 orders, four refunded cases is over the line. This is the one metric Etsy names in the same sentence as suspension.
6. Under 40 reviews, count the 3-star-and-below ones on your fingers. Five of them puts you under the standard, whatever your average says.
7. Ship on time, or lengthen the processing time. A longer honest processing time costs you nothing in ranking; a missed one costs you the metric.
8. Turn on tracking even where it is not required. Star Seller counts on-time shipping only with valid tracking or an Etsy-purchased label.
9. Diarise the 1st of the month. Both bars are recalculated then, on a rolling 3-month window — a bad week takes three months to leave the numbers.

Listing SEO — the fields Etsy actually matches

Etsy names four places it matches a shopper’s query: tags, titles, descriptions and attributes. Categories and attributes work like tags, and Etsy says exact duplicates between them are waste.

10. All 13 tag slots filled. An empty slot matches nothing.
11. No tag over 20 characters, and none wasted on a single word. Etsy caps a tag at 20 characters including spaces, and says “custom bracelet” beats “custom” and “bracelet” separately. In a sample of 522 phrases taken from live listing titles, only 35.6% were short enough to be a tag — that constraint is the whole game.
12. No tag repeating a category or attribute you have already set. Etsy treats those as tags already.
13. Every attribute filled, including the optional ones. Attributes are a buyer’s filter as well as a keyword field — an unfilled attribute removes you from a filtered search entirely.
14. Title front-loaded and readable. Etsy changed its own title guidance in April 2026 and now warns against “adding long lists of keywords to your titles”. The current shape is here.
15. The first 160 characters of the description doing real work. That is what shows above the fold and what a search engine pulls into a snippet.
16. Category as specific as Etsy allows. “Vague categorisation” is one of the things Search Visibility flags by name.
17. Renewal treated as a cost, not a ranking trick. Relisting a listing nobody clicks changes nothing about why nobody clicks it — the twelve-point diagnostic covers what to check instead.

Photos — where Etsy publishes hard numbers

18. First photo at least 635 pixels wide. Etsy states it plainly: below that you risk “showing up lower in searches”. A ranking factor with a published number, and the one most easily missed on old listings.
19. 2000 pixels or more on new photos. Etsy’s own recommendation.
20. Each file under 1MB. Larger images “may not finish uploading”, which is how a listing quietly ends up with four photos instead of ten.
21. First photo landscape or square. Etsy says the first photo dictates the shape of the rest.
22. Same shape across every photo in the listing. Etsy calls this “a more cohesive browsing experience” — it is free, and it shows in the first second.

Shipping, policies and the boring fields

23. A return policy on every listing. A missing return policy is flagged by Search Visibility by name.
24. Shipping cost treated as a search factor, not only a margin question. Etsy’s own Search Visibility page evaluates it.
25. Processing times you can hit in your worst week, not your best one — see point 7.
26. Shop policies, About section and announcement all filled. Etsy’s shop-level check covers logo and setup completeness; an empty shop page is a trust problem before it is an SEO one.

Pricing — the four that decide whether any of this is worth doing

27. Every fee in the price, not just the 6.5%. Etsy takes more than the transaction fee, and two of its fees are charged on money you never keep — worked through on a real $38 order here.
28. The $0.20 renewal counted as a recurring cost. Every four months, automatically, sold or not.
29. Your own labour costed at a number you would accept from someone else.
30. The break-even order count known for the month. If you cannot say how many orders cover your fixed costs, no amount of tag optimisation will tell you — the free pricing calculator works it out.

Three things to do with this

1. Do points 1–3 today, on one listing. Etsy has already done the hard part of that section for you.
2. Check yourself against the floor, not the badge. Star Seller is worth having. Customer Service Standards is worth keeping, and it is the one with a suspension attached.
3. Run points 10–22 on your five best-selling listings only. Auditing 200 listings is how an audit becomes a week you never finish. The five that already earn are where a fix pays back fastest.

Sources: Etsy Help — Search Visibility page, Customer Service Standards, Star Seller, image requirements and how tags work, all read 14 September 2026.

Questions people ask about this

How often should I audit my Etsy shop?

Both of Etsy’s own scorecards are recalculated on the 1st of each month on a rolling three-month window, so once a month, just after the 1st, matches the data you are being judged on. A bad week takes three months to leave the numbers, which is the real argument for monthly rather than quarterly.

What is the difference between Star Seller and Customer Service Standards?

Star Seller is an optional badge: 95% message response within 24 hours, 95% on-time shipping with tracking, and a 4.8+ average rating. Customer Service Standards is the floor every shop is held to: 80% response within 48 hours, 80% on-time shipping, limits on low reviews and on refunded cases. Etsy says falling below the floor risks lower search visibility and, for cases, suspension.

Does Etsy tell you what is wrong with your listings?

Partly, yes. The Search Visibility page in Shop Manager flags low image resolution, unclear primary photos, vague categories, missing return policies and shipping costs, and clears each one within about 24 hours of a fix. It does not check your tags, your pricing or your titles.

What image size does Etsy actually require?

Etsy recommends at least 2000 pixels on the width and height, and states that a first photo under 635 pixels risks showing up lower in search. Keep files under 1MB, use .jpg, .gif, .png, .svg or .heic, and make the first photo landscape or square.

Is it worth auditing every listing?

Rarely. Do the shop-level points once, then run the listing points on the five listings that already make money. A 200-listing audit is usually a week that does not get finished, and listings with no sales are often a demand problem rather than a setup problem.