If you run an Etsy shop you should download your listings on a regular basis. That way you’ll have a file to use if something happens and you need to recreate your listings!
Downloading your shop listings is really easy because Etsy gives us a way to download a CSV file with all of the shop listing information.
Unfortunately, there isn’t any way to upload the file to populate the listings in your shop, but at least if you have a file you’ll have all of the text and details to work with!
Table of Contents
- How to download your Etsy shop listings csv file.
- What information is included in the listings CSV file?
- How to use the listings CSV file.
- Use the CSV file for recreating older listings.
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How to download your Etsy shop listings csv file.
To download the CSV file that contains all of your Etsy listing information:
- Go to your shop dashboard on a desktop computer.
- Select “Settings” on the left-hand side.
- Click on “Options.”
- From the options page, select “download data.”
- At the top of the page, select “Download CSV” in the top section that’s called “Currently For Sale Listings.”
- Open the file after it downloads and save it as a backup for your Etsy shop listings!
This file can be opened using Excel, Google docs, or any other program that reads CSV files.
What information is included in the listings CSV file?
The Currently For Sale CSV file includes the following information about each listing:
- Title
- Description
- Price
- Currency the shop uses
- Quantity listed at the time the file was downloaded
- Tags
- Materials
- Photo image links
- Variations
- SKU if you’ve entered one
The categories and attributes that are associated with the listings aren’t included in this file, but the main parts that you’ve written and included, including links to all of the photos, are.
There are a few things that you can use the file for, but one thing you can’t do is upload the file to your Etsy shop. It makes you list everything one at a time, but it might be possible to do it with help from Etsy support if it ever came to that.
How to use the listings CSV file.
Downloading the listings file every now and then is a good idea, but you can’t really use it to “back up” your shop since Etsy doesn’t let you upload a CSV file to populate your listings. The sheet isn’t that useful for editing on Etsy, to be honest, but you can use it to see if there are listings that are missing some information, or to upload the listings to other places online.
Uploading the info to other platforms is probably what it’s going to be the most useful for, even if you’ll probably want to go in and rework the titles to fit the format of the other platforms.
You’ll probably have to reformat it to fit what the different platforms need, but if you have the basic information you can copy and paste the information into the format they need and you’ll be able to recreate the listings by uploading them.
You can also use this file to get information about the tags that you have, or to find specific keywords in your listing titles.
If you click on any cell in the spreadsheet, then press “Ctrl F” on a PC, a search box will open up and you can type a term or keyword that you want to search for. This is handy if you’re looking for something that isn’t searchable in the listings manager, like something in the materials section.
You can also download the listings information and do a quick scan to see if there are things that you want to increase the inventory on by sorting the spreadsheet quantity column from lowest to highest. To do that, click on the column E letter, then click on “sort and filter” at the top right. Select “sort smallest to largest” then click on “expand the selection” so that all the rows stay in order and don’t get mixed up by sorting only the column.
If you want to see if there are listings that are missing information, or that only have a few photos, you’ll be able to see that on this sheet by looking to see if there are any listings that only have one or two links to photos.
If you want to fill out the materials section for each listing, you can use this sheet to find the ones that are missing information. Do a visual scan for any listings that are missing information in that column, then add it on Etsy.
Use the CSV file for recreating older listings.
If you download the files on a regular basis, you can build a little library of historical information about your Etsy listings. This can come in handy if you ever have a situation where you’ve deleted or rewritten listings, but you want to change it back to the way that you had it.
This has happened to me a bunch of times when I accidentally edited a listing instead of copying it! I end up changing the whole thing and publishing it and it’s not until I hit the button to finish things that I realize that I’ve wiped out the original listing.
If I had the downloaded spreadsheet, I could just go in and find the listing I messed up, and copy and paste the title, tags, and description to get it back to its original text.
That might be the best “hidden” use for it, but you’d have to be sure to download the files on a regular basis to keep an updated catalog of listings.
Downloading your listing info on a regular basis is a good habit to get into. If you ever have a reason why you would need to find a listing description from the past, it will be there and you’ll be able to recreate it, even if you can’t upload it directly.
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