If you use Pinterest as a marketing strategy for your Etsy shop or online business, you probably want to make sure that the pins that you pin, and that other people pin from your website, will be connected to your business.
Claiming your website is something that Pinterest lets business account owners do, but can you claim your Etsy shop?
Can you claim your Etsy account on Pinterest?
The short answer is no, you can’t claim an Etsy shop on Pinterest. This is because the Etsy website is owned by Etsy, not by the shop owner, who’s basically renting space on Etsy for their shop. Since you have to own the website that you claim, shop owners can’t claim their shops on Pinterest.
You used to be able to claim Etsy shops, so this is a change on Pinterest’s end. They also eliminated the ability to claim YouTube channels and Instagram accounts, so Etsy shops aren’t the only victim!
You can still claim your own website, but not your Etsy shop or social media accounts. (There’s a way around this, though, which I’ll talk about a little further along.)
What does claiming an account do?
Claiming an account basically meant that if anyone pinned the photos from the accounts you had claimed, your information would show up next to them if they linked to that URL. You got credit for the pin and were able to see stats for it even if someone else pinned the image. You can also see stats for traffic to that website in Pinterest analytics.
Because you could save things from social media and Etsy accounts before 2022, you might still see that your older pins are connected to those accounts.
But anything that you pin going forward may or may not say your shop name on it, depending on how it was pinned.
And Etsy controls that, so you won’t be able to guarantee that your shop name will show up anywhere on the pin at all. It might, but it’s not guaranteed.
As far as the stats. that’s too bad, because now you have to look at Etsy stats to see where the traffic is coming from, and they don’t give you any real details on the specifics.
You won’t be able to see which types of pins are working best to drive the traffic to Etsy, and that’s not great.
Why can’t you claim your Etsy shop anymore?
Pinterest didn’t tell us why they changed the account claiming process, but it probably had something to do with their move toward retail and selling products on Pinterest. Because they started encouraging businesses to upload catalogs of their products to Pinterest, and because Etsy is the business that controls their entire catalog, they probably decided to let Etsy upload their catalog and disconnect individual Etsy shops from that option.
This means that Etsy controls the catalog of every product on Etsy, which lets them pin directly from Etsy and to display the product details from Etsy listings on Pinterest.
We can’t claim our own shops, but Etsy does include them in their catalog, so with that in mind, there is a way around the fact that we can’t upload our own Etsy catalogs.
How to use the Etsy catalog on Pinterest.
If you want to tag products from your Etsy shop you can still do that using Idea pins, which let you put a product sticker on them if you use the Pinterest app. You can also pin directly from Etsy, and it will connect to the Etsy catalog on Pinterest so that the pin will be a product pin.
The downside of this is that when you pin directly to the Etsy catalog, Etsy is going to show people who click through to your listing items from other shops, too.
You’ll have to decide whether you like that idea, or whether you want to make your own pins and add your own URLs to prevent Etsy from showing other people’s products on your listing.
But basically, you can take the convenience of pinning using Etsy’s catalog, or create your own pins so that you can alter the link, which takes more time.
How to change your Etsy shop URL if you use their catalog.
When you copy the Etsy listing link by pinning directly from Etsy or from the Etsy catalog, you’ll see the line of similar items at the top of the page when you click through to the listing. This is because it’s in Etsy’s best interest to show people as many things as they can when they get social media traffic, so they set it up that way.
If you want to change the URL you’ll have to restructure it to use the https://(your shop name here).etsy.com/listing/(listing number here) structure.
If you do it that way, you won’t see the line of similar listings when you click through, but it does involve more work when you pin things.
Be warned that this usually works, but I’ve heard reports that say that it doesn’t always work, so pinning to Etsy can be tricky anyway.
There are other reasons to not pin directly from the Etsy account, but I won’t go into those here.
If you want a full Pinterest strategy and blueprint, check out my Pinterest class. I update it regularly because Pinterest changes A LOT, and all the time: Pinterest for Product-Based Businesses.
Is it worth using Pinterest if you can’t claim your Etsy account?
It is absolutely worth using Pinterest if you have an Etsy shop, but you need to do it strategically and not just randomly pin every listing in your shop.
I wrote another article about whether Pinterest is worth it here, so check that one out: Is Pinterest Worth It For Etsy?
But the short story is that the more traffic you can get to your shop (or website) the better it will be as far as sales go.
Even if you can’t claim your Etsy account anymore, it doesn’t mean that Pinterest isn’t an extremely useful tool to get more traffic.
You should definitely take advantage of the fact that Pinterest brings a lot of people to Etsy, and grab some of that for yourself!
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