If you shop on Etsy you might want to keep your purchases private for some reason. Maybe you’re buying gifts for someone, you’re buying supplies for your own business and you don’t want the competition to see where you get them, or you just don’t want someone spying on you.
The question of whether Etsy shares your information or not comes up a lot, so can people see what you buy on Etsy?
Etsy doesn’t share sales information directly, but there are some ways that people can figure out what you bought. These include looking at reviews, looking at your computer at your house, sellers potentially sharing information about you on their social media, and someone going through your personal email or credit card bills.
Table of Contents
- Does Etsy post your purchase history anywhere?
- What happens if you leave your account open and someone in your house looks at your shopping history?
- Can people see the reviews that you left for a product?
- Sellers might share reviews on social media.
- Sellers might use reviews from Etsy on their own websites.
- Other ways that people can see what you bought on Etsy.
- How to (kind of) guarantee that people won’t see what you bought on Etsy.
Some of the links in this article are affiliate links that will pay me a small commission if they’re used to purchase something. To see the entire affiliate policy click here.
Does Etsy post your purchase history anywhere?
Etsy doesn’t directly share any information that link customers to sales on the platform. They won’t even show sellers statistics about traffic to listings unless there’s enough to disguise who searched for what search term to get to a listing.
Unless you’re logged into your personal account and can go to the purchases and reviews section, you won’t be able to see what you’ve bought from Etsy selelrs in the past.
However, your purchase history is included in your personal profile, and there’s no way to delete it unless you want to delete your Etsy account completely.
You don’t have to worry about Etsy DIRECTLY telling people what you bought by looking at your personal profile if they’re not logged into it, though.
But if someone goes into your personal account, they WILL be able to see what you bought.
What happens if you leave your account open and someone in your house looks at your shopping history?
If you’re logged in to your Etsy account and someone in your household can see the logged-in account, they’ll also be able to see what you bought if they go to your personal profile. There’s no additional sign-in required to see your purchases and reviews, so if someone can get to your signed-in account they’ll be able to see your purchases.
The way to prevent this would be to sign out of your Etsy account every time you leave the site, so if you have a lot of nosey people in your house, and you don’t want them to figure out what you’re buying, you should do that.
Just to point this out, if you’re a registered user on Etsy and you have favorites that are public, anyone can see those whether they’re signed in or not.
So if you also want to hide your favorites from people (like if you’re making a shopping list for birthday gifts) you might want to set your favorites to private!
I wrote another article about privacy on Etsy in general that talks about this kind of thing, and you can read that here: Privacy Settings On Etsy.
Can people see the reviews that you left for a product?
Reviews that are left on Etsy are public, so people WILL be able to see what you bought if you review products that you purchased. There’s no way to hide reviews, or to leave them if you’re logged out of your Etsy account, so every review is public.
If you’re an Etsy seller who doesn’t want people to know what you’re buying on Etsy, you shouldn’t leave reviews!
If you don’t want people to know what you’ve purchased in general, you shouldn’t review things in any public setting because Etsy won’t remove the review unless you contact them to ask them to do that, and that’s a hassle.
For an article about how to review something on Etsy, click here, but remember that it will be public: How To Leave A Review on Etsy
Sellers might share reviews on social media.
Since reviews are public, a lot of sellers will use screenshots or text from them on their own social media. Etsy also encourages sellers to share reviews on social media by letting us post them directly from Etsy.
This will share your Etsy username and profile picture on social media, which is fair use as far as Etsy’s concerned since they let us do it.
If you post a review publicly it can be used for promotional purposes, so be aware of that.
Not every seller does share reviews, but if you 100% don’t want your information to be shared for whatever reason, don’t leave a review.
To see the full Artisan Shopping Directory sections, including signups for discounts, click here.
Sellers might use reviews from Etsy on their own websites.
Sellers might also use reviews from Etsy on their own websites, since the reviews represent the service and product quality of their products regardless of where they were purchased.
Some people will do this and remove identifying names or use initials for customer privacy, but if the reviews are posted publicly on Etsy there’s already no expectation of privacy.
Sellers should usually try to be considerate of customers’ privacy and not use identifying information on anything, but you need to be aware that public reviews might be used for marketing purposes.
Other ways that people can see what you bought on Etsy.
When you buy something on Etsy, whether you’re registered or not, Etsy will send you a confirmation email, plus emails along the way as the package is shipped and delivered. To prevent anyone from seeing what you boguth, you would have to prevent them from looking at your emails.
Etsy will send these even if you haven’t signed up for marketing emails, because this kind of email is considered to be transactional because it’s about one specific purchase.
Make sure that you don’t have your email open for nosey people to see what you bought if that’s a big concern.
As far as someone seeing the payment for the thing you bought, they could theoretically see your credit card bill, but that won’t show what you bought, just that you bought something.
How to (kind of) guarantee that people won’t see what you bought on Etsy.
If you want to almost guarantee that people can’t see what you bought on Etsy, you can check out as a guest. Guests can only leave reviews if they go back and register, then claim the previous purchases with that account.
Because there’s no on-Etsy link to guest accounts and purchases, and you don’t have to log in to purchase as a guest, the only way that someone would see that you bought something from Etsy would be to look in your email or on your credit card bills.
That’s why I say ALMOST guarantee…There’s no 100% perfect way to make sure that someone who’s really determined doesn’t go through your personal accounts.
Make sure to log out of everything, though, because that’s the best way to prevent people who are snooping to see what you’ve purchased online, whether it’s from Etsy or anywhere else.
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