Mobile and web craft marketplace Etsy has been busy as of late. Late last month it launched a better mobile search engine that shows shoppers more digestible search results for general queries, helping shoppers—particularly mobile shoppers—more quickly find what they want amid Etsy’s more than 30 million products. This week, the e-marketplace added a local shopping aspect to its app.
Called Etsy Local, the feature is available in the smartphone and tablet iOS and Android apps and helps shoppers locate stores near them that sell items from Etsy sellers that they have purchased from in the past. It also will let consumers know when an Etsy seller they may be interested in is appearing in-person at a local market or in-store event.
For a store to be included in Etsy Local it must have placed at least five purchases on Etsy Wholesale, a marketplace for professional buyers and designers, and have completed a purchase order within the past six months on Etsy Wholesale.
Etsy sellers, meanwhile, can add events like craft fairs and markets that they are selling at to Etsy Local. Sellers also can locate stores of retailers that are part of Etsy Wholesale. There is no fee to the store when a shopper buys at a store retailer on Etsy Local.
When a shopper opens the Local tab in the Etsy smartphone or tablet app, she can see recommended nearby retailers and events based on shops and sellers she has previously engaged with through favoriting, purchasing or browsing. Consumers can also discover new places to shop by viewing nearby local boutiques that carry Etsy merchandise.
Etsy Local appears on the app home page. From there, shoppers tap to click on a map of nearby stores or events and access listings to view more information, including hours of operation and images of available items. Shoppers can chart a course to new locations via the map if they are visiting a new area.
In its Q2 earnings call with analysts, Etsy said its app had been downloaded 28 million times by the end of the second quarter versus 25 million at the end of the first quarter. Etsy said on the call it has been working hard to drive consumers to the mobile app because they are more likely to buy in the app than on the Etsy mobile site. Etsy says mobile devices accounted for 60% of the traffic and 43% of the sales in the second quarter, both figures seven percentage points higher than during the same quarter last year. Sales on Etsy’s marketplace, what the company refers to as gross merchandise sales, or GMS, increased 24.6% year over year.
The Etsy Local introduction comes less than one month after Etsy updated its search results. Etsy says about one-third of its searches are what it classifies as low intent. These are consumers who it deems are shopping around leisurely using general search terms such as “purse” as opposed to more specific phrases like “evening clutch”.
With the search result update, instead of displaying the millions of items that match the search query “purse” the search results display the items in categories within purse such as “totes” and “money clips.” Consumers can then tap or click on a category to browse those items.
In an A/B testing period, consumers clicked on categorized search results 10% more often than on non-categorized results, Etsy says. The percentage was higher on smartphones,
The update is especially useful for shoppers on smartphones, since it’s easier for consumers to tap on product categories on a smartphone than to type in words to get to what they are looking for. Etsy’s product listings are from individual sellers, which means they aren’t classified by conventional manufacturer product numbers. Those numbers contain defining characteristics of products, such as size, color and manufacturer. Without that data, a consumer searching for a sparkly tote, for example, might not see a handmade item of that description; having the categories helps consumers filter through such products.
Etsy also said in its Q2 earnings call that it is working on Google App indexing, which takes a consumer using an Android phone directly from an organic search result on Google.com to the relevant page within the Etsy app. Etsy also began in the first quarter a “deep-linking” project, which directs shoppers who have downloaded the Etsy iOS app into the app whenever they encounter an Etsy link. App indexing for Android and deep linking for iOS are essentially the same thing, taking shoppers directly into a related page in an app when a shopper taps a link on her smartphone rather than taking her to the mobile site.
Etsy posted Q2 gross merchandise sales of $546.2 million, up 24.6% from $438.5 million in the same quarter last year. Without the impact of currency fluctuations, mainly the stronger U.S. dollar, Etsy says its sales would have increased 26.5% year over year.
Etsy is ranked No. 20 in Internet Retailer’s 2016 Mobile 500 Guide, which ranks the top 500 m-commerce retailers according to mobile sales.
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