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4 new ways shopping on Etsy is easier than ever – Metro US

4 new ways shopping on Etsy is easier than ever

Etsy
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If you’ve logged on to Etsy this week, you might have noticed the shopping site looks a little different. And in this case, change is definitely good. We chatted with Jaime DeLanghe, Etsy’s senior product manager for search to get the lowdown on all the new features.

1. Searches are filtered into easy-to-narrow categories.
“The thing we know about people who use Etsy is that they love to search,” DeLanghe says. “A lot of the time, they aren’t even looking for something specific; they want to search for something [broad] like jewelry.” Before, browsing for jewelry on Etsy would bring up millions and millions of items, making the results very overwhelming. Now, when you search for something, it is broken down into categories. For example, when you search for jewelry, you can then narrow your search by earrings, rings, necklaces and bracelets.

2. It’s easier to shop by trend.
The new filtered search works for trends, too. DeLanghe uses the example of searching for “boho.” Before, anything a seller tagged as “boho” would show up in a series of seemingly endless pages. Now, the boho search is filtered into different categories such as clothing, bath and beauty, purses, accessories and jewelry. “It breaks it into more reasonable chunks for people to see an overview of the marketplace,” DeLanghe explains.

3. There are new categories that didn’t exist before.
“We used to have a lot of items on the site that we didn’t have categories for at all,” DeLanghe says. It’s hard to believe, but until this week, Etsy didn’t have a “phone case” category. “With our new category system, we can update it much, much more frequently,” she says. For example, earclimbers — a type of earring — have become really popular lately, and Etsy was able to add an earclimbers category as soon as the trend started taking off.

4. It’s easier to use on mobile.
DeLanghe says more than half of their traffic comes from mobile users, so updating their mobile version was a big priority. The app will be relaunching within the next few weeks, carrying out the same search updates that are on the site, plus a more visual way of sorting.

Follow Emily on Twitter: @EmLaurence