A bio page for an Etsy shop

Pointing your bio at your shop front is the obvious move and it costs you three things, none of which are visible from your side.

1. It loses the specific thing. Somebody who came from a post about a particular piece lands on a grid of forty and has to go looking. A share of them do not, and you never find out which share.
2. It cannot say anything. A shop front shows listings. It does not say who you are, that you are running a sale, that orders are paused for two weeks, or that the thing in your last post is back in stock.
3. It gives away the visit. Every person who taps that link arrives on a marketplace optimised to show them other sellers' products. That is Etsy working exactly as designed, and it is not a criticism, but it is a real cost worth understanding.

A page in front of the shop fixes all three, and it costs one extra tap for people who wanted the shop front anyway.

The order that suits a shop, which is different to the order that suits a creator.

• The thing from your last post, first. Whatever you posted about most recently is what most of today's visitors came for. With an image, not just a title.
• Two or three other listings, chosen not listed. Your best sellers, or the ones that photograph well. Not all forty: a bio page is a recommendation, and the shop is the catalogue.
• The email signup, third. Right after the things people came for, while they are interested and before they leave for the shop. This is the most valuable item on the page and it is not the shop link.
• The shop front, fourth. Labelled with what is in it. "See all 40 pieces" beats "My Etsy".
• Anything time-limited, with an expiry. A sale, a market stall you are at this weekend, a closing date for custom orders. Set the date when you add it, not later, because later never happens.

This is the Etsy-specific version of a general problem, and it is worse here than almost anywhere else, because it is not a failure. It is the design.

Etsy listings expire on a fixed cycle and have to be renewed. Items sell out. Seasonal pieces get deactivated. Every one of those turns a link on your bio page into a dead end, and nothing tells you: the page looks exactly the same, and the only symptom is people arriving at a listing that no longer exists.

If you have six listings on your page and you refresh your shop every season, you have six links that will each break at some point in the next four months. Checking them by hand is a task nobody sustains.

Etsy does not hand you your buyers' email addresses for marketing, and it is entirely within its rights not to. The consequence is that after a sale, you have no way to reach that person again except by paying to advertise to them, or hoping they come back.

For a shop that depends on repeat buyers, that is the whole business problem in one sentence. And the only fix available to you is to collect the addresses yourself, before or instead of the sale, somewhere that is yours.

A bio page is the cheapest place to do that. Somebody who found you on Instagram, tapped through, and is looking at your work is at the highest-intent moment you get. A signup box there, with a specific promise attached, converts far better than one anywhere else you could put it.

• Promise something specific. "First look at new pieces, before they go in the shop" is worth an address. "Newsletter" is not.
• Deliver immediately. A list you collect and never mail is worse than no list.
• Then use it for the launches. A drop announced to a list you own does not depend on whether an algorithm felt like showing your post that day.

The full version of this is on collecting emails, including the first-ten-minutes part that decides whether the list is worth anything in a year.

For the wider version of what belongs on the page, the page for makers and fashion covers the ordering, and the Instagram guide covers getting people to the link in the first place.