How to Search for an Item on Etsy
If you've landed on Etsy with the idea of finding a specific item, you'll be grateful for the site's robust Search tool. With the Etsy Search tool, you can search for handmade items, vintage items, and supplies. You can also use it to locate a particular seller or shop and to search among items and shops you've hearted.
To use the Search tool, follow these steps:
While on Etsy's home page, type a keyword or phrase in the Search field, located on the right side of the header bar.
As you type your keyword or phrase, Etsy displays Search Suggestions — that is, links for items that may constitute a good match. Etsy culls these suggestions from recent searches performed by other folks on the site. If one of these Search Suggestions matches what you're looking for, simply click it to view a list of relevant items.
Click the down arrow to the left of the Search field and choose one of the following from the list that appears:
Handmade
Vintage
Supplies
All Items
People
Shops
If you're logged in to your Etsy account, you'll see two other options: Your Favorites and Your Favorite Shops. Choose these to search for items or shops you've hearted, respectively.
Click the Search button.
Etsy returns a list of items that match your criteria. If you searched for a specific person on Etsy, the list contains people whose user names start with the keywords you typed.
Optionally, sort the search results by clicking the Most Recent, Relevancy, Highest Price, or Lowest Price link.
To narrow your search results to items in a particular category (say, Jewelry), click the category link on the left side of the screen.
Click an item in the list to view its item listing.
If you searched for a person, click her user name to visit her profile page.
When you launch a search from a page other than the Etsy home page, you may notice that the options in the list are different. For example, when you start your search from the Treasury, you see a Treasury option in the list. By selecting this option, you can limit your search to the Treasury. Likewise, when you start your search from a category page, such as the Geekery page, you see a Geekery option in the list, enabling you to limit your search to items in that category.
If your search efforts fail to yield useful results — for example, Etsy returns too many matches — try these techniques:
To search for a specific phrase, surround it with quotation marks. For example, suppose that you want to find items related to the movie Roman Holiday. Enclosing the phrase in quotation marks limits the results to pages that contain the specific phrase.
To exclude pages with a certain word from your results, precede the word you want to exclude with a minus sign. For example, suppose that you want to find listings that pertain to mustangs (as in, the horses). To omit listings that relate to the Ford Mustang automobile, you could add -Ford to the search string. (Note that there's no space between the minus sign and the word.)
