Etsy’s marketplace is defined by the creativity and craftsmanship of our sellers and the hundreds of millions of highly diverse products they offer. You can find silversmiths who cold-forge recycled sterling silver, weavers who dye raw fleece with indigo and black walnut, and ceramicists who throw stoneware on a kick wheel. These details define each product and often determine whether…
Etsy Code as Craft
https://www.etsy.com/codeascraft · 20 posts · history since 2023 · active
26 May
20 Mar
When buyers search on Etsy, they need to quickly and easily find the perfect item. At the same time, sellers need to be confident their unique products are being seen by the right customers. Our Ads Search ranking model, which is built on a multitask learning foundation, is the critical link in this connection. Recently, we identified an opportunity to…
19 Mar
Etsy has maintained a sharded MySQL architecture since around 2010. This database cluster contains most of Etsy’s online data and is made up of ~1,000 tables distributed across ~1,000 shards. Over the last 16 years, it has grown significantly: combined, these tables have over 425 TB of data and receive roughly 1.7 million requests per second. Etsy engineers access our…
16 Jan
Ever searched for something specific, only to be met with results that are close, but not quite? On Etsy’s Search Relevance team, that frustration is exactly what we are tackling. Our goal is simple yet ambitious: to help buyers find exactly what they’re looking for, and to help sellers reach the people seeking their special products. Search plays a central…
25 Nov 2025
In 2021, we published a blog post titled “Increasing experimentation accuracy and speed by using control variates,” describing how we reduce the variance of metrics using CUPED in our experimentation platform. This is a follow-up on how CUPED has evolved at Etsy since then. Spoiler – It’s changed a lot, decreasing our average experiment duration by 3 days! Etsy’s mission…
29 Oct 2025
Rarely are there opportunities for big, bold, game-changing improvements in web performance. The Speculation Rules API (SRA) is a recent browser development that offers just such an opportunity. This post details a joint effort between the search and the web performance teams at Etsy to implement SRA on Etsy search pages and drastically improve the performance of product listing pages…
13 Oct 2025
For more than 20 years, Etsy has been the destination for human creativity online. Our marketplace is home to more than 100 million special items made, handpicked and designed by more than 5 million sellers. These items and the real people behind them are what set us apart. But while the huge variety of Etsy’s inventory is one of our…
8 Oct 2025
Imagine you have a fabulous idea to drive more sales on Etsy by giving out free ice cream with every purchase. How would you know if it will actually work? One way to test this out is to run an experiment! An experiment is a learning tool that can help us see if a new change really affects user behavior…
3 Sept 2025
Every day, shoppers from Etsy's community of nearly 90M buyers visit our marketplace to search for unique, handmade, and vintage items. But with over 100 million listings, how do we help each buyer find exactly what they're looking for? Traditional search and recommendation systems often fall short of capturing the nuanced interests that make each Etsy buyer unique, from specific…
19 Aug 2025
This post investigates the benefits and limitations of prompt engineering in two instances of AI-assisted onboarding relying on large language model (LLM) technology. Of particular interest is how truthful (and therefore reliable) LLM-generated answers turn out to be in the context of Etsy-specific question answering. Among other insights, we find that asking the LLM to identify specific source snippets is…
29 Mar 2025
In the past, sellers were responsible for managing and fulfilling their own tax obligations. However, more and more jurisdictions are now requiring marketplaces such as Etsy to collect the tax from buyers and remit the tax to the relevant authorities. Etsy now plays an active role in collecting tax from buyers and remitting it all over the world. In this…
28 Jan 2025
One of our Guiding Principles at Etsy is that we “commit to our craft.” This means that we have a culture of learning, in which we’re constantly looking for opportunities to improve and learn, adopt industry best practices, and share our findings with our colleagues and our community. As part of that process, Etsy recently adopted Jetpack Compose – Android's…
6 Aug 2024
At Etsy, we’re focused on elevating the best of our marketplace to help creative entrepreneurs grow their businesses. We continue to invest in making Etsy a safe and trusted place to shop, so sellers’ extraordinary items can shine. Today, there are more than 100 million unique items available for sale on our marketplace, and our vibrant global community is made…
17 Jun 2024
In 2020, Etsy concluded its migration from an on-premise data center to the Google Cloud Platform (GCP). During this transition, a dedicated team of program managers ensured the migration's success. Post-migration, this team evolved into the Etsy FinOps team, dedicated to maximizing the organization's cloud value by fostering collaborations within and outside the organization, particularly with our Cloud Providers. Positioned…
7 Jun 2024
Etsy features a diverse marketplace of unique handmade and vintage items. It’s a visually diverse marketplace as well, and computer vision has become increasingly important to Etsy as a way of enhancing our users’ shopping experience. We’ve developed applications like visual search and visually similar recommendations that can offer buyers an additional path to find what they’re looking for, powered…
18 Mar 2024
Easily the most important and complex screen in the Buy on Etsy Android app is the listing screen, where all key information about an item for sale in the Etsy marketplace is displayed to buyers. Far from just a title and description, a price and a few images, over the years the listing screen has come to aggregate ratings and…
5 Mar 2024
Balancing Engineering Ambition with Product Realism Introduction In July of 2023, Etsy’s App Updates team, responsible for the Updates feed in Etsy’s mobile apps, set off with an ambitious goal: to revamp the Updates tab to become Deals, a home for a shopper’s coupons and sales, in time for Cyber Week 2023. The Updates tab had been around for years,…
18 Sept 2023
A little while ago, Etsy introduced a new feature in its iOS app that could place Etsy sellers' artwork on a user's wall using Apple's Augmented Reality (AR) tools. It let them visualize how a piece would look in their space, and even gave them an idea of its size options. When we launched the feature as a beta, it…
5 Sept 2023
Introduction Each year, Etsy hosts an event known as “CodeMosaic” - an internal hackathon in which Etsy admin propose and build bold advances quickly in our technology across a number of different themes. People across Etsy source ideas, organize into teams, and then have 2-3 days to build innovative proofs-of-concept that might deliver big wins for Etsy’s buyers and sellers,…
14 Jul 2023
Introduction Personalization is vital to connect our unique marketplace to the right buyer at the right time. Etsy has recently introduced a novel, general approach to personalizing ML models based on encoding and learning from short-term (one-hour) sequences of user actions through a reusable three-component deep learning module, the adSformer Diversifiable Personalization Module (ADPM). We describe in detail our method…