It’s a long standing annoyance of mine that Etsy has seemingly favored horizontal imagery in shops for a long, long time – but that vertical images work really well in most other places (Pinterest, blogs, etc). The Etsy thumbnail is cropped horizontally and the way the listing pages are laid out absolutely favors horizontal imagery (because the longer your image is, the further down the page your description goes.) Meanwhile, Etsy has adopted a Pinterest style browse layout, which DOES favor vertical images, just like Pinterest itself does. Let’s take a look:

Annoying right? What’s more important? To get noticed in browse and leverage Pinterest? Both of which will make the most of traffic that hasn’t hit your shop yet. Or to have horizontal images that make your listing pages a bit more pleasing for the customers who have already made it to your page?

it’s better to make the images more favorable to the browsers that haven’t made it to your shop yet.

Making the most of the images that GET the traffic to your shop, basically. Now, as you know, the image that shows in search and browse, is the image that will be the first in your listing page.

It’s pretty interesting that in most places on Etsy, shoppers will see the thumbnail of your photo, but not on browse! On browse, they see the FULL image!

In order make my shop more pin friendly – and thus, more Pin-able once it is on Pinterest – and also to appeal to the vertical favoring in Browse, I’ve run a little experiment in my shop. (At the time of this writing, my Etsy shop is on vacation, but this is what I was doing for about 1.5 months before my shop went on vacation.)

This was just a trial – to see how it goes, how I felt about it, etc – and so i’m just sharing my experience here with you.

I took all of my listing images that were horizontal, and turned them into vertical images. Further, I added text to them, which is something that we see a lot on Pinterest – and apparently, adding copy to a vertical image makes a pin more likely to be pinned.

It took a bit of work and time, but here’s what I ended up with:

It actually isn’t terrible on the listing page, either!

Now, I didn’t want the text to show in my main shop page. I wanted my listings to look pretty much as they did in the thumbnail, gallery version and list version view of my shop, so I adjusted the thumbnail in the edit listing mode.

Step one: click “adjust thumbnail” after uploading your vertical image.

Step two: Drag your image around until it is cropped as you’d like it. In my case, this meant moving the image down so the text was cropped out of the thumbnail.

Results: My shop shows “normal” text-less images in list and gallery mode.

When I pinned these images myself (which I only really did a few times) I did notice they got more attention than the text-less horizontal images did when I pinned those. Now, like I said, my shop is on vacation at the moment, so I don’t have a lot of data to share numbers wise, but I think for many shops, this might be something worth trying, specifically if your actual item is vertical!

Generally I do suggest making all of your images the same size and shape on Etsy (all five within a listing, especially) but this might be worth a try for you if you’re inclined to updating a lot of images and feeling experimental.

What do you think?