What should I write in my Etsy listing description?

You write down the answers to every question a buyer would ask you if she could tap you on the shoulder, you put them in order of how badly each one would stop her buying, and you write them the way you'd say them out loud. That is genuinely the whole job, and I want to keep hold of that plain version for a minute, because the blank description box does something odd to makers. You sit down knowing your product better than anyone alive, and 10 minutes later you're typing and deleting the same first line.

I think it happens because the question in your head quietly changes while you're sat there. It stops being "what would she need to know before risking £40 on a stranger?" and becomes "what will the algorithm want to see?", and the second question has no answer a human can write. I sold quilts and tote bags on Etsy myself, made from cotton I imported from America, and the fabric was the entire point of the price, which no photo can prove on its own. The description was where that argument got made, or didn't, and it only became easy to write once I stopped writing it for a search box.

What should the first 2 lines of my description say?

The most persuasive true thing about your product, because those first 2 lines are all anyone sees before deciding whether to tap "read more", and hardly anybody taps it.

Which means the opening line has a proper job to do, and "Welcome to my shop!" is not doing it. Neither is "Thank you for stopping by". Those are lovely instincts, but they spend the only guaranteed seconds you get with a buyer on a greeting she didn't need, while the fact that would have sold her sits 4 paragraphs down where she'll never see it.

So lead with the thing that justifies the price or settles her biggest doubt. "Quilted from 100% American quilting cotton, so it washes again and again without going thin" earns its place in a way no greeting ever has. If your buyers always worry about size, the size goes first. If they always ask whether it arrives gift-ready, that goes first.

What questions does a buyer need answered before she'll buy?

All of them, ideally, but they're not all equal, so order them by how hard each one blocks the sale.

What it actually is and what it's made of comes first. Then size, and in terms a person can picture rather than bare numbers, because "150cm x 200cm" sends her off to find a tape measure, while "big enough to cover a 2-seater sofa with some left to tuck in" lets her see it in her own front room.

Then how it arrives and how long you take to dispatch, because a buyer 3 weeks out from a birthday needs that answer more than any other one on the page. Then how to care for it. Then whether it can be personalised, and how, and what you need from her to do it.

And after the practical questions, briefly, the human bit. Who made this, and why does it exist? Two or three sentences about you at your table is plenty, but don't skip it, because it's the entire reason she's buying from a person instead of a supermarket. She could have had cheaper. She wanted somebody's hands in it.

Then look at the shape of what you've written. Short blocks with space between them, because she's reading on her phone, probably on the sofa, possibly with a child climbing on her, and a solid grey slab of text gets skipped whole no matter how good the words in it are. Read it out loud once, and anywhere it doesn't sound like you talking, change it until it does.

Do keywords in the description help me get found?

Not in the way we've all been told, and stuffing them in definitely doesn't. The finding job belongs to your title, your tags and your first photo, which I've written about separately in why your Etsy listings get no views, because being found and being bought are different jobs done by different parts of the listing.

The description's job starts after the finding has already worked. By the time anyone reads it, she has searched, seen your photo and tapped, so filling the box with "handmade baby quilt cot quilt nursery bedding new baby gift" does nothing for her at all. Worse than nothing, actually, because to a human that reads as spam, and now she's wondering what else in your listing was written for a machine rather than for her.

A keyword-stuffed description that answers no questions has never once rescued a sale, and I'd put money on it having quietly killed a fair few.

How do I know what my description is missing?

Your customers have already told you. Open your Etsy messages and read the last 5 questions buyers sent you, because every single one is a question your description failed to answer, asked by somebody who cared enough to type it out. Most people never type it out though, they just leave.

So the questions sitting in your inbox are the best free edit you will ever get. "Does the tote bag fit an A4 folder?" means your sizes aren't picturable. "Would this arrive by Friday?" means dispatch isn't clear enough. Answer each one inside the listing itself and the next buyer won't need to ask.

And underneath all of this there's something worth sitting with. Every description is quietly trying to close a trust gap with a stranger, somebody who has never heard of you, in about 30 seconds, in text, which is a genuinely hard job for a box of words. But have you considered how much smaller that gap is for somebody who has been watching you make the thing for weeks? Who saw the fabric arrive, and heard why you changed the binding halfway through? She doesn't need convincing by the time she reads anything. She arrives already sold, and the description just confirms the details.

On a marketplace, nearly everyone reading your description is a stranger, so it carries the hardest possible version of the job every single time, and moving your business away from depending on that is most of what I teach. If you want to start building the audience that arrives already trusting you, the Handmade Launch List is where you get the first piece of it standing, free, one link of your own that a reader can put her name into. The description work above will help your listings convert this week. The audience work is what makes everything after that less fragile.

A description is your half of a conversation you never got to have. Somewhere today a buyer stood at your listing holding a question, and when the page didn't answer it, she didn't ask. She moved on to the shop that had answered before she got there