How do I get repeat customers on Etsy?

You get repeat customers by being able to reach the people who already bought from you, and Etsy is set up to stop you doing exactly that. I'd rather give you the straight answer than pretend there's a clever trick hiding in your listing photos somewhere, because this is where maker shops quietly lose the most money, and most of us never see it happening.

I sold on Etsy for years myself. Quilts and bags made from cotton I imported from America, glitter hairbows before that when there was no money coming in and going back to work early was the alternative, and feathers on eBay in my late teens if you go right back far enough. My best sales weekends never came from strangers finding me in search. They came from people who had already bought once, loved what arrived, and wanted to know what was coming next.

Why don't my Etsy customers come back?

They would, and that's the maddening part. Someone finds your shop, buys the bag, loves the bag, shows her sister the bag. She is the single most likely person in the world to buy from you again, and then you never hear from her after the review.

Watch what happens the moment she pays. The order confirmation that lands in her inbox comes from Etsy. The recommendations underneath it show her ten other shops selling something similar to yours. Her email address goes into Etsy's system rather than yours, and Etsy's own rules say you can't use it to market to her. The whole time, she was Etsy's customer, and you were the shop Etsy happened to route her through that day.

Etsy rents you a customer for one sale. None of that is an accident either, because Etsy spends millions making buyers loyal to Etsy. A buyer who comes back to Etsy might buy from any shop on there and Etsy gets paid whichever one she picks, so you can see which kind of loyalty they'd rather build.

And I can tell you exactly how invisible you are to your own buyers, because I've been that buyer. I bought a template on Etsy, liked it, and months later bought the same template again from the same seller without realising until afterwards that it was the same shop. I liked her work enough to pay for it twice and I still couldn't have told you her name. She had no way to tell me either. If she'd been able to email me when she released something new, I'd probably have bought that too, and she'll never know.

Doesn't a discount code in the parcel bring them back?

Has popping a discount code in the parcel ever actually brought someone back to buy again? I ask because I did it for years, and I could count the customers it brought back on one hand.

The code asks the customer to do all the remembering. She has to keep the little card, then remember your shop name three months later when she needs a birthday present, then type it into Etsy's search box, then not get distracted by everything Etsy puts in front of her on the way to your shop. That's a lot of small miracles in a row, and the 10% off at the end of them was never the reason she'd return anyway. She'd return because she loved the thing you made. The card goes in the kitchen drawer with the takeaway menus, and that's the last anyone sees of it.

The parcel insert itself is a good idea, mind. A discount code is just about the weakest thing you can print on one, and I'll come back to what belongs there instead in a minute.

So how do I actually get repeat customers?

You own the relationship instead of renting it, which in practice means one thing: a list of people who asked to hear from you. Email, in my case, because no algorithm sits between you and somebody's inbox, and no platform can quietly change the rules on you halfway through.

I got this exactly wrong before I got it right, and the wrong version was the discount code. In my jewellery business I put one in every parcel that went out, thinking I was encouraging people back. What I was actually doing was reducing what I earned from someone who had already bought from me, and pointing her back at Etsy to spend it, because the code only worked there. I was paying out of my own margin to hand a customer I had already won back to the platform that keeps her name and her email address. It took me years to see that written down plainly.

The version that worked came later, in the fabric business, and it was almost embarrassingly cheap. I put packs of scrap fabric into people's orders. You could only get the scraps if you used my code, and you could only get the code by signing up. The scraps had cost me nothing, they were offcuts heading for the bin, and people absolutely loved them. They were not a bribe anyone tolerated on the way to a discount, they were the best bit of the parcel.

So the thing going into the box stopped being money off my own work and started being the reason somebody gave me a way to reach her again.

That's the difference between launching and listing. A listing sits and waits to be found by a stranger. A launch goes out to people who already said yes once.

How do I start this week?

Small, and free at this size. You need somewhere for people to sign up, which the free tier of any email platform gives you. You need a genuine reason for them to join, and first look at new collections beats any discount here, because your best buyers want early access to the thing more than they want money off it. Then you put that invitation everywhere a buyer actually looks: the thank-you note in the parcel, your shop announcement, the link in your bio.

Which means the parcel insert finally gets a proper job. Instead of a code she'll lose, it carries the one route back to you that Etsy doesn't control.

Even ten names is a real list, by the way. Ten people who loved something you made and asked to hear about the next one... that's more buying intent than a thousand strangers scrolling past a listing, and it does my head in a bit that we're all taught to chase the thousand.

What you send those people, how often, and how you build up to a launch like that Christmas one is more than one blog post can hold. The first piece is the Handmade Launch List, free, and it's the bit that has to exist before any of the rest of it can.

Somebody out there loved what you made enough to pay for it. Right now, Etsy is the only one who knows how to reach her