Guide

How many tags can an Etsy listing have?

Thirteen. Each one can run to 20 characters, and none of them may contain a comma. Most sellers use eight or nine and leave the rest empty, which is four searches they have decided not to turn up in.

A tag is a phrase, not a word

This is the part that trips people up. hand thrown mug is one tag, not three. You are not filling thirteen slots with thirteen words, you are choosing thirteen phrases, and a phrase somebody would actually type is worth more than a single word competing with everything else in the category.

So mug is a wasted slot. There are hundreds of thousands of those. hand thrown mug narrows it to something a person is looking for on purpose, and it costs you the same one tag.

Twenty characters is tighter than it sounds

Spaces count. That is what catches people, because the phrase you would naturally write is usually a character or three over:

Dropping personalized for custom saves six characters and means roughly the same thing to somebody searching. That is the usual shape of the fix: find the long word and swap it, rather than cutting the phrase down to a single term.

Use all thirteen

There is no penalty for a tag that does not match and no bonus for restraint. An empty slot is simply a search you are not in. If you are short of ideas, the ones people forget are materials (stoneware), the occasion (housewarming gift), who it is for (gift for coffee lover), and the style (minimalist kitchen).

What does not help is thirteen rewordings of the same phrase. blue mug, blue mugs, a blue mug and blue coffee mug are one idea wearing four hats, and they compete with each other rather than covering more ground.

The comma, which matters more in a spreadsheet

A tag cannot contain a comma, and if you keep your products in a spreadsheet this is not a rule you can quietly ignore. Tags are usually held in one cell separated by commas, so a comma inside a tag reads as the end of that tag and the start of another. In a CSV it is worse than that: an unquoted comma shifts every column after it, and the row arrives with the description sitting in the price field. There is a page on that and the other ways a product CSV goes wrong.

Tags and the title are doing different jobs

A title can run to 140 characters and reads as a sentence to a person. A tag is a phrase matched against a query. Repeating your title verbatim across your tags wastes them, because the title is already being read. Use the tags for the phrasings the title had no room for. There is a page on titles, and on why the first four words are the ones that decide it.

listWright checks all of this before a listing comes back to you: the count, the length of each tag, and the characters that would break a spreadsheet. Anything over the line comes back marked with the rule it broke, so you fix it in the sheet instead of at the import screen.

How many slots are you leaving empty right now

Worth knowing rather than guessing. Upload the listings you already have and the free audit counts the unused slots across the whole file, along with any tag that is over the line. It costs nothing and it changes nothing in your shop.

If you are looking for the format

The columns listWright reads, and what each one becomes, are on the help page. If you came here wondering whether you can upload a CSV straight to Etsy, the short answer is no, and the long answer is here.

Etsy changes its tooling from time to time. This page describes how things stood when it was written. If a limit has moved since, Etsy's own help pages will say so before ours do.