Here is the phrase: Etsy, online market for bizarre, handmade goods and personalized everything, presses a pause with refined television advertisements, which you probably saw during the holidays. Instead, it doubles on something less flashy, but potentially much more powerful-powered. Why? Because people don't watch ads. They are looking. And Etsy wants to meet them where they are.
According to The Wall Street JournalEtsy is now changing its budget and focuses on improving the way his products appear in search engines such as Google, and investing in AI tools to better understand what customers really want – even when they don't know how to ask for it (1).
Why a rotation?
Let's be honest – TV ads are expensive. Cool, yes, but fleeting. Etsy CMO Brad Minor simply informed this: Platform Przemyśl its media mix, putting light on search marketing and artificial intelligence. This is partly because online shopping has changed. People do not wait for the brand to show them something cool – they enter “handmade cat sweater for Sphynx” on Google at 2 am and they hope that the algorithm is good.
And Etsy? Well, he has millions of sellers and even more niche items. Adjusting the appropriate buyer to the appropriate product is like a match on a scale. Ai makes sense here.
Wild AI card
Here is Kicker: Etsy bends on generative artificial intelligence to predict what the buyer is – even if the question is unclear, strangely formulated or even strange. This means improving your own Etsy search on site and squeezing product lists using copies and tagging. It's not just about better ads, it's about a smarter market.
This year, the company has already introduced many AI internal tools to help sellers write product descriptions and improve photos. And this is not alone on this journey. Retail giants, such as Amazon and Walmart, also poured money into the discovery of AI-hughanced, hoping that online shopping will be more intuitive, even for the undecided.
But will it work?
This is true here. Ai is not a magical wand. Over the past few quarters, Etsy has faced growing pains. Active buyers have fallen by 3% year on year. Sale of gross products? Also down. Skeptics may wonder: is AI a solution or shiny entertainment?
To say that, Etsy hopes. It's not about tricks – it's about being visible. At a time when Tiktok trends and Pinterest boards drive movement, Etsy wants to make sure that when someone searches the “Cottagecore mushroom lamp”, this is one of their sellers who appear at the top. Not some fakes of large boxes.
And hey, they still have a heart. Unlike Amazon, Etsy lives in the charm of individual artists. AI in this context is not intended to sterilize experience – it aims to inform the right manual product from a real person, faster and more accurately.
A larger trend?
The Etsy movement is part of a wider change in the world of e-commerce. Even Shopify recently presented the AI shopping assistant, Sidekick, which helps shop owners to automate everything from products to products to customer response. Personalization is no longer “pretty”; These are tables.
Meanwhile, new TiTKOK search ads are trying, which gives brands an abbreviation to obsession with the obsession with the Z. Google generation. Google also introduces generative artificial intelligence to search for shopping, which gives users selected suggestions powered by his AI Gemini.
Therefore, the rotation of Etsy is not just about abandoning television-it is about surviving in a noisy, driven by AI, the first world.