if you’re an Etsy seller, there might come a time when you need to change your shop’s location. How do you do that, what are the limits of doing it, and what else do you need to keep in mind?
First how do you change your shop’s location on Etsy?
To change your shop’s location on your Etsy homepage, simply edit the homepage to show your new location. In order to change your account location, you need to change your personal account settings, and you may also want to change your regional preferences. Changing these will not change your bank’s location however, that’s something that’s more complicated.
Changing the location as it appears to customers is pretty easy, but why would you want to do this? There are a few good reasons so read on and let’s get into that.
Table of Contents
- Why would you want to change your Etsy shop location?
- How to change your shop’s location on your home page.
- How to change your personal account location.
- How to change your regional preferences.
- What are best practices for location on Etsy?
- Can I change my bank account location on Etsy?
Why would you want to change your Etsy shop location?
There are many reasons why someone would want to change their Etsy shop location. The most obvious is that they may have moved and their business is located in a different area. There are also situations where people need to hide their location based on personal safety or privacy issues.
It’s not uncommon that someone will actually move to a different state or a different country, and in that case you may want to keep everything together as far as the legalities of your business goes. Changing your shop’s location would be a part of that.
I’ve also heard of situations where people had an actual stalker in real life and they didn’t want to disclose much personal information about themselves.
It would only make sense that being able to put a location that is not your physical location would be a good thing in cases like that.
There are also other reasons why you would not want to have your physical location on your shop, and most of those have to do with privacy and are very individual to each Etsy seller.
Because you can choose just a country for your location, this is usually a good solution, and it will give people a reasonable amount of privacy while still disclosing where their packages are shipping from for the customers’ information.
How to change your shop’s location on your home page.
To change your shop’s location on your homepage on desktop, go to your Etsy shop’s homepage while you are logged in to your Etsy account.
Click the pencil icon to edit your shop, then click the pencil icon that appears next to the shop’s location directly under your shop’s name at the top of the page.
Choose a new location by typing it into the edit box. You can choose a city that’s close to you or a new city if you have moved somewhere different, or you can choose to just put the country that you’re located in.
If you just choose the country, Etsy might give you a hard time because they want to be able to use local search filters. Just type it in and keep hitting enter until it accepts the country by itself.
Save your edits and your new location will show up on the home page of your shop.
Remember that if you want to appear in local searches you will need to put a city location and not just the country that you’re located in.
Etsy does allow for filtering for location, so if you leave the city off you may not be included in searches by people who are shopping local.
How to change your personal account location.
If you change your shop’s location you may also want to change your personal account location.
To change your personal account location, go into your personal profile and click the account information link there. This will open a window where you can change your location in your personal profile. Choose either a city or just the country, but remember that if you do want to be included in local searches and give the customers that information you may want to choose a city as well as the country.
In this video I changed my personal account location to the US only, and Etsy really didn’t like it. I had to type out almost the whole thing, it wouldn’t let me choose the country from the dropdown.
After a few tries it did accept it, though.
Changing your personal account to a different location does not change the banking information that’s registered with Etsy.
You might also want to avoid putting your personal account in a different location than your shop account because this can lead to confusion with customers.
How to change your regional preferences.
To change your regional preferences on Etsy, click on your personal account and choose account information. Click on the preferences tab when it opens up. In this section you can choose what currency you want to use in your Etsy account, what language you want your Etsy account to be set in, and what region you want your Etsy account to be connected to.
Etsy uses regional preferences to show you things that ship to your location. It also probably comes into play if there is a regional component to a country’s search placement, such as Canada, Australia, and the UK.
Your regional preferences don’t affect where your shop can be seen in search. For example, if you put the United States as your regional preference it doesn’t mean that your shop will only be seen in the US.
Regional preferences are for your personal account, not your shop account, so it might affect your own search results when you’re shopping, but it won’t affect your shop.
What are best practices for location on Etsy?
As a general rule, it’s best to keep your locations and regional preferences the same on Etsy unless you have a very specific reason why you would not want to do that. Some of these may include being a POD seller whose supplier ships from a different country from the one that you are located in, or if you have multiple locations that you work from that are located in different countries.
In cases like that, you’ll need to decide what makes the most sense for your business and your customers as far as saying where your shop is located.
For example, if you have multiple people who work in your shop and they are located in different countries, you may want to put your shop’s location in the country where the shipping happens, as opposed to the country that you’re located in.
This is better for the customer experience because a lot of people want to get shipments from a specific place in order to make the transit time shorter.
Many customers specifically choose only to order from certain countries, and if it turns out that the shipment is coming from somewhere else they may get mad about that!
Can I change my bank account location on Etsy?
At this time it is not possible to change an Etsy account’s bank account information from one country to another country unless both accounts are located in the Euro Zone. If both accounts are located in the EU, you can contact Etsy support for help with transferring the bank account information. Other than that, the only option is to open a new Etsy shop with the correct bank information or continue with the old bank,information.
However, I have heard of cases where sellers were able to transfer their bank accounts between different countries, but it involved a lot of contact with Etsy support and a lot of begging.
The problem with leaving a bank account in a different country is that you’re then dealing with two separate sets of laws about taxes, plus you’ll have to deal with currency conversion, which is an additional fee on top of all the other Etsy fees.
It’s always worth it to try to be polite and persistent and contact Etsy support in order to try to get this resolved.
Sometimes, however, it might be best to just open a new shop and start over, unless you know for sure that you don’t want to do that because your shop is very large, or you might be moving back to the original country at some point.
If you’re not sure about moving it might end up that you would have to do the whole thing again and switch everything around, and that’s really inconvenient and time consuming.
It never hurts to try to contact Etsy support and find out what your options are. Like I said, I have heard cases where they were able to switch bank accounts between countries, but it did involve a lot of time and back and forth with Etsy.
The bottom line is that Etsy shop location can be changed for a variety of reasons, and you just need to make the best decision for yourself and your customers.
It’s simple to change what the location says. It’s not as simple to change the account information, but you might be able to do that if you really need to and you’re persistent about it.
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