Guide
How to bulk upload listings to Etsy
Etsy has no bulk upload of its own, so this is really a question about which of three routes you take and how you get a clean file ready for it. The preparation is the same whichever one you pick, and it is where almost all of the work is.
First, the part that surprises people
There is no page in Shop Manager where you upload a spreadsheet and get listings. Etsy's CSV is an export, not an import. The long version is here, but the short version is that "bulk upload to Etsy" means one of these:
| Route | What it costs you | Good for |
|---|---|---|
| By hand in Shop Manager | Time, and nothing else | Under about twenty products |
| Etsy's Open API | App registration, approval, code against OAuth | Anyone who can build, or pay someone to |
| A third-party listing tool | A subscription, and an Etsy connection you grant it | Most sellers, most of the time |
Most third-party tools take a CSV. That is the step this guide is about, because a good file makes any of the three routes work and a bad one fails all three in the same ways.
Step 1. Get one row per product
A header row, then one row per product, and a column that identifies each one. A sku, a code, a handle, whatever you already use. That identifier is what lets a second upload update a product instead of creating a duplicate of it, which is the difference between re-running your catalogue and doubling it.
You do not need particular column names. Whatever you already track is what the copy gets written from, and a richer row produces a better listing: material, size, colour, who it is for.
Step 2. Write the copy once, for every row
This is the part people put off, and it is why most catalogues sit half-listed. Every product needs a title, a description and tags, and writing two hundred of those by hand is a weekend you do not get back.
Whether you write them yourself, hire it out, or generate them, do it in one pass across the whole sheet rather than product by product in the Etsy editor. Working in the sheet is what makes the next step possible at all.
Step 3. Check the limits before you upload, not after
An import that fails halfway leaves you reconciling what went and what did not. These are the rules that most often send a bulk upload back:
| Field | Limit |
|---|---|
| Title | 140 characters |
| Tags | 13 per listing |
| Tag length | 20 characters each, spaces included |
| Commas in a tag | Not allowed |
The tag length is the one that catches people, because spaces count. There is more on fitting a phrase into 20 characters and on why the first four words of a title matter most.
Step 4. Check the file itself
Separately from the listing rules, the file has its own ways of going
wrong, and the worst of them are changes your spreadsheet made without
telling you. A sku of 0042 read as a number comes back as
42 and no longer matches anything in your shop.
Six of those, and how to check for each.
Step 5. Import, then review in Etsy
Whichever route you took, look at the first few live listings before you push the rest. Check that the photos matched the right rows, that prices landed in the price field, and that nothing reads as though it were written about a different product.
Doing it again next month
The reason the stable identifier in step 1 matters is that a catalogue is never finished. New products, changed prices, a description you want to rework. With an identifier in place, a second pass touches only what changed, and rows you have not edited can be skipped instead of rewritten.
Related
The columns listWright reads are on the help page. If you are weighing up whether to have the copy generated at all, what that gets wrong and how to catch it is worth reading first.
Etsy changes its tooling from time to time. This page describes how things stood when it was written. If Etsy has since added a bulk upload, their own help pages will say so before ours do.