If you’ve sold on Etsy for any length of time, you’ll probably start getting people who favorite your listings and follow your shop.
A lot of people don’t know what to do when that happens, and the truth is there are only some things that you can do, and only indirectly.
When someone favorites your Etsy listings, you’re not supposed to do anything to directly contact the customer on your own. Because of spam laws, Etsy sellers aren’t supposed to contact customers with unsolicited messages, and that includes sending messages to someone who’s favorited your items.
There are some things that you can do to indirectly contact people who favorite your listings, but you need to go through the right channels that are set up on Etsy for that purpose.
Table of Contents
- What should you do when someone favorites your Etsy listings?
- Can you send a coupon to people who have favorited your Etsy listings?
- Why do some people favorite Etsy listings but they don’t buy anything?
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.
What should you do when someone favorites your Etsy listings?
When someone favorites your listings or follows your shop, you shouldn’t do anything. The terms of use on Etsy say that sellers can’t use the messaging system to send unsolicited messages to shoppers, and unless someone sends you a message first or places an order, all messages from you would be considered to be unsolicited.
It’s tempting to send people thank you notes and coupons to try to get them to buy the things they favorited, but you can’t do it.
You can’t send coupons, and you can’t send convos just for a favorite!
Those are considered spam, and people can mark those messages as spam to get rid of them.
If you get too many spam reports, Etsy will suspend your messaging privileges, and you won’t be able to use the convo system at all.
Unless Etsy sets up a system where people opt-in to receive messages from individual sellers, we can’t send people things that they didn’t ask for, whether it’s a nice message or not!
There are some things that you can do that MIGHT get the attention of people who have favorited your listings, though. These aren’t guaranteed to get more sales because Etsy puts limits on how often they contact people, but I’ve done some of these and they do tend to work.
First, you can set up a favorites coupon through the Etsy targeted offers system. If you have those activated, Etsy might send a discount code to people if they’ve favorited things in your shop.
It’s not guaranteed, though. There are limits on how many they send out so that people won’t be overwhelmed.
I wrote another article about the promotional coupons here: Should You Turn On Etsy Abandoned Cart And Favorites Coupons?
Another thing that you can do is watch to see if a lot of people have favorited an item without buying it and run a short sale on it.
Running a sale on an item will trigger Etsy to show the sale to people in a few places, including the notifications feed, and occasionally in promotional emails for people who have signed up to get those from Etsy.
I’ve done this and it can result in sales because it brings people back to your shop who have already shown interest in the listings.
Using the Etsy system is the best way to get coupons to people who have favorited your listings, and it won’t get you in trouble for spamming people, either!
Can you send a coupon to people who have favorited your Etsy listings?
No, you can’t send anything to people just because they favorited your Etsy listings. Doing that violates the terms of use as far as the Etsy messaging system is concerned.
I wrote another article that goes into the reasons for this in more detail here: Can You Send Coupon Codes To People On Etsy?
The basic reason is that unless people ask to hear from you, you can’t contact them. Favoriting a listing doesn’t count as asking to hear from you!
I know that people do this, because I’ve received a lot of messages from people after I favorited their listings.
However, I don’t like it when people do that, for a few reasons.
First, I get way too many things that I have to respond to on a daily basis, and having messages sent to my Etsy shop that I didn’t ask to get wastes my time.
Also, because of the Star Seller program, everyone has to respond to a message within 24 hours, and that includes promotional messages that I didn’t ask for.
I can either respond or mark them as spam in order to maintain my response rate, and guess which one I’ll probably do? Spam.
I don’t really care about the Star Seller rating thing, but I also don’t want to have to see the annoying messages that Etsy sends when you’re not 100% on those ratings. So if you send me something I didn’t ask for, I’m going to mark it as spam.
And as I mentioned above, if your messages are marked as spam too often, you can be banned from using the Etsy message system completely, so you definitely don’t want that to happen.
Why do some people favorite Etsy listings but they don’t buy anything?
People favorite things for a lot of reasons, ranging from actively shopping for something to just wasting time while they window shop. Favoriting listings on Etsy is a way to keep track of things that you might want to buy, or things that you might just like for some reason even if you don’t want to buy them.
Favoriting can happen whether a customer is ready to buy something, or when they’re just browsing.
I don’t pay attention to favorites that happen in my shops because they don’t mean that someone is actually going to buy something.
They’re one way to gauge how popular things might be, but on the other hand, it doesn’t guarantee a sale, so don’t put too much importance on them as far as that goes.
On the other hand, Etsy does use favorites on listings as a signal about the customers who should be interacting with it, so it does help to have people favoriting things that they genuinely like.
Don’t tell your friends and family to go favorite everything in your shop unless they really like it, though, because Etsy uses customer interaction to decide who to show things to.
If people favorite things that they don’t like, it will send the wrong signals to Etsy, and that can make it show your listings to the wrong people!
So to sum up, if people favorite your Etsy listings, don’t do anything directly.
If you want to send them a coupon, turn on the Etsy favorites coupon in the sales and coupons section in the marketing tab on your shop dashboard, or run a short sale on that item.
It won’t guarantee that you get sales because of the coupons, but it will potentially get the listing in front of people again to remind them about it!
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