Etsy Changed My Processing Schedule Without Asking

In March 2024, Etsy emailed a large number of sellers to tell them it was about to change a setting in their shop on their behalf. The setting was the processing schedule, the days of the week Etsy uses to calculate your delivery estimate. The email read:

Hi there,

It looks like you’ve been regularly shipping orders over the weekend, but your current order processing schedule doesn’t reflect this. Adding Saturday and Sunday to your order processing schedule will let us show buyers more accurate (sometimes faster) delivery times. We’ll automatically make this change for you on March 26. Our data shows that shoppers are more likely to purchase an item if it ships faster, even if just by one day!

The notice went out to sellers who do not ship on weekends too, as one of them wrote on the Etsy community forum. Whatever data Etsy was looking at, it was not reliably the seller’s actual dispatch pattern.

What the change actually does

Your processing time is a number of days. Your processing schedule is which days count. A three day processing time on a Monday to Friday schedule means an order placed Friday afternoon is promised by Wednesday. Add Saturday and Sunday to the schedule and the same order is promised by Monday.

That is the whole change, and it is why it matters. Etsy did not shorten your processing time. It changed which days count, which shortens the delivery estimate the buyer sees. If you do ship on weekends, the new estimate is accurate and probably helps. If you do not, you have just promised something you cannot deliver, and late dispatch counts against your shop.

Why opting out is not a clean answer

The email had a decline button, and Etsy honoured it. The problem is what the email also said: shoppers are more likely to buy an item that ships faster, even by a day. Etsy uses delivery speed as a signal in search. It does not say how much weight it carries.

So the choice was never “accurate schedule or inaccurate schedule”. It was “accurate schedule and possibly lower visibility” against “faster promise and the work of keeping it”. Sellers who opted out kept control of their own shop and may have lost placement to sellers who did not. Sellers who accepted it gained an estimate they now have to honour on Saturdays.

Neither is wrong. What is worth noticing is that Etsy made the decision reachable only by changing a setting in your shop first and asking second.

The bigger point

This is one example of a pattern. Etsy sets the fees, the ranking signals, the ad placements and the rules on what you can say in a listing, and it changes them by email. The weekend schedule was a small one. Offsite Ads, where Etsy charges a percentage of sales it attributes to its own advertising with no opt out above a revenue threshold, was a bigger one. There will be others.

None of that makes Etsy a bad place to sell. It brings buyers to you, which is worth a great deal, and for a lot of makers it is the only channel that works. It makes Etsy a bad place to be the only place you sell.

What I tell Etsy sellers

Keep Etsy. Add a store you own. For most sellers that is Shopify, where the customer list, the checkout and the rules are yours, and nobody emails you to say a setting has been changed on your behalf. I wrote a longer version of the case in should you migrate from Etsy to Shopify.

The honest difficulty is traffic. Etsy brings it. On Shopify you have to bring it yourself, and that is a skill most Etsy sellers have never had to learn. The Shopify store marketing checklist covers the pieces in order, and the bakery post is the smallest example of paid traffic I have written up.

If you are weighing the move, book a call. The first question I will ask is what share of your orders come from Etsy search rather than from people who already know your name, because that number decides how hard the move will be.

Nikhil Sharma

I run data and operations for a DTC brand on Shopify, consult on Meta and Google Ads, and build AI automations for ecommerce teams. I write about what I build and run.

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