The roll-out of the new wider shops has well and truly begun (it happened for me yesterday)!  Firstly, let me say the new layout looks absolutely fabulous – cleaner, fresher and with a much bigger focus on the actual goods being sold.  And the feedback I’m seeing on social networks and forums, from both buyers and sellers, is overwhelmingly positive.  Nice work Etsy!

If you aren’t seeing the wider layout yet, you will be seeing it any day now – hooray!  As there are some minor impacts on your shop that you will need to address, here’s a quick list of some things you might want to think about to help you prepare for the change.  Feel free to add to this list!

1. Wider shops allow you to feature four items.  I’m sure most of you have more than three featured items anyway (as a backup in case one of the featured items sell) but if not make sure you have at least four items featured to ensure there’s no blanks when you switch to the wide view.  Browsing Etsy today (in wide shop mode!) I can see a high percentage of shops with only three featured items.

2. Possibly the biggest change is how shop announcements are managed – only the first three lines are shown, and the rest appears as a pop-up box when ‘read more’ is clicked.  I think this is such a big improvement, as it puts your items front and center. (After all, that’s what is really going to lure the customer, not a five paragraph shop announcement.)  Then, if the customer is taken by your wares, they have the choice as to whether to ‘read more’ or not.  This also helps those of us who are our own worst enemy – time and time again we are told by successful sellers and customers alike that short shop intros are the best, but sometimes we can’t help but be a little wordy.  This cuts us off.

Although the customer can read the full shop announcement if they choose, you might want to have a look at the first few lines of yours and rework it to fit the new format. Do you get straight to the point right away? Do the sentences that are immediately visible still convey whatever message you are striving for (eg. Welcome?  Something unique about your products/technique?) You may also want to review your item listings and shop policies to ensure that any information that you feel is critical from customers to know is included there as well.

A note on SEO – the full shop announcement is still visible to search engines, so this change will not impact any carefully crafted SEO boosting words you have in there!

3. Shop navigation is now on the left (not the right).  This makes it consistent with all of Etsy’s other pages, though I can tell you it takes more than a bit of getting used to!  I have seen some shop banners that include an arrow saying ‘shop by section’ and pointing to the right side of the screen – these will obviously need an update (unless your goal is to confuse your customers of course!).

And briefly:

- Shop banners stay the same size, so no resizing needed there (thank goodness!)

- Wider shops mean 24 items displayed per page!   This provides potential buyers with immediate access to a wider range of your products, surely a good thing!  If you are anything like me (who had only just managed to fill one whole page of the narrow shop!), this means you need to get crafting to fill those extra spaces.  It may also impact how you arrange the items in your shop now that the grid is 6 x 4; it really can change the whole ‘feel’ of your shop, especially if you carry a good variety of items.

- Images are also bigger, giving customers a better view of your products in the thumbnails.

- Remember that while you may not be seeing your shop in ‘wide mode’ yet, there are probably thousands of people who are – so get cracking on this stuff now!

That’s all that has sprung to my mind. If I’ve missed anything, please share it with us by leaving a comment below.

As you can tell I’m quite excited about the new look on Etsy – are you?

~Emily Orpin