Deleting a listing on Etsy can happen if you’re totally done with it, by accident, or if you’re being strategic about your website competing with Etsy on Google. Deleting a listing is drastic because of what happens when you do it.
When you delete a listing on Etsy, it’s completely gone, and there’s no way to restore it to the same state that it was in when it was deleted. Etsy doesn’t have a “recycle bin” that you can use to restore a listing, so deleting is permanent and irreversible.
There are definitely some good reasons to totally delete a listing from Etsy, especially if you have a website where you sell the same thing.
For an article about how to delete a listing from your Etsy shop, click here.
Table of Contents
- How to delete a listing on Etsy.
- Will deleting a listing remove it from your sales stats?
- What should you do if you delete a listing by accident?
- When should you delete a listing from Etsy?
How to delete a listing on Etsy.
To delete a listing on Etsy, go to the listing manager and find the listing that you want to delete completely.
Click the gear icon and choose “delete” at the bottom.
You’ll see a warning about completely deleting the listing and you can proceed or just deactivate it instead, which won’t remove it from your shop entirely.
Click delete and the listing will be completely gone from your shop.
Will deleting a listing remove it from your sales stats?
Deleting a listing from your Etsy shop won’t affect your sales stats for the times that listing sold in the past. You’ll still have the credit for those sales in your shop stats, and you’ll also be able to see the reviews for that item in your shop reviews.
The listing will also still show up in people’s favorites, but if anyone clicks on the pictures, they’ll see a little message that the listing is unavailable.
This will be the same message that they see if they come from an outside link to the deleted listing. There won’t be a way that they can see anything about the listing itself.
This doesn’t take it out of your stats, though. You won’t be able to access any information about the listing because it won’t be in your shop anymore, but it will still be part of your shop history.
If you want to get rid of old listings that you don’t want to see anymore, or if you’re trying to clean up your listings manager, you can delete listings without worrying about it affecting your sales numbers.
You can also just leave them in the deactivated or sold-out sections, though, because you never know when you might need the information about them for something!
What should you do if you delete a listing by accident?
The first thing that you should try is to contact Etsy support to see if they can restore the listing. This is especially important if you have a bestseller that you deleted because you don’t want to lose the sales stats on a listing that’s sold well in the past. Try a chat or request a phone call back to speak to a real person directly.
Use this article for ways to contact Etsy: How To Contact Etsy For Buyers and Sellers
You can recreate a listing that you deleted by making a new one with the same information, but you’ll have to have that information somewhere other than Etsy. One way to keep the information handy is to download the CSV file of all of your Etsy listings.
The original listing won’t be recoverable, but the title, tags, and description, plus pricing information, is included in the CSV files, so you’ll be able to copy it from there and paste it into the new listing.
To download the files with your shop information:
- Go to your shop dashboard
- Click on Settings
- Click on Options
- Choose the Download Data tab
- At the top in the “Currently For Sale” section, click on Download CSV
In the spreadsheet that you download, the columns are labeled with the information they have, and you’ll be able to get the information to recreate your listing there.
Downloading your currently on sale listings once a month (at least) is a good idea in general just as a backup, and this is another reason to do it.
When should you delete a listing from Etsy?
If you have a website and you want to stop selling specific products on Etsy and only sell them on your site, that’s a good time to delete them from Etsy entirely. Because the way that Etsy displays listings on Google is a little complicated, it’s best to totally remove them from the Etsy system if you don’t want to sell them on Etsy at all.
Deactivating listings will also remove them from Etsy’s system, but Etsy has changed the way different types of inactive listing notifications look after clicking through from Google in the past.
The only 100% way to guarantee that Etsy will stop showing your listings in Google search results is to delete them entirely.
I deleted these sea glass molds from the Etsy system over a month ago at the time that I’m writing this, and they’re still showing up in Google, but with “out of stock” on one of them.
If someone clicks on those, they’re taken to Etsy, where they will then see the item is unavailable and also see a bunch of listings that aren’t mine.
What will eventually happen is those won’t show up at all because they’ll fall out of the Etsy catalog that’s connected to Google. Until then, they’ll still show up on Google, so if someone clicks on them it will take them to Etsy.
And here’s the thing…If I deactivated those listings, they would still be in the Etsy catalog, even if they’re not active.
That means that they could potentially linger around on Google for a lot longer. I want them to only show up to take people to my website, so deleting them completely from Etsy is the best way to do that.
Luckily, you’ll get a warning before deleting a listing completely, so it’s not that easy to delete one by accident.
More likely is that you’ll think that you’re editing a copy when you’re actually editing the original listing, which will mess you up too. But you can always recreate the original using the CSV file (if you downloaded it as a backup) and undo your damage!
Deleting a listing is pretty final, so make sure that you’re doing it for the right reasons.
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