I've seen enough anger and fear in the past two days to last me until next year

So, apparently, there's a huge deal going on over at Etsy with Sellers.  (btw, here's my shop Handmade of Awesome)

It seems that very recently (as in, this week) Etsy has changed the default search results from the most recent, to the most relevant.  This means for you, as a buyer, you will get more relevant search results when you search for an item, instead of the most recently listed with the keywords you searched for.  This makes incredible sense to me.

What this means for sellers, is the way we have been selling on Etsy has changed.  Before this change took place, sellers could relist their items as many times during the day and night that they wanted to be at the top of the search results, without worrying too much about kewords and product titles.  Now, when buyers come to the site and simply search for what they want, the most recently listed items aren't going to appear, so, for sellers that have depended on spending hundreds of dollars a day or a week to relist their items multiple times a day and making those hundreds back and then some, are now not selling anything.

Many of these sellers depend on their Etsy shop, so now, they must go back through their hundreds of listings to change all the titles and keywords to be 'relevant'.  Which is what they should have been doing the whole time, I think.

I haven't seen much of a difference since the whole thing went down, so I guess I was doing things right.  I've read in their forums from sellers that are quite angry about this and from those that are super happy because now they're getting sales.  I guess I'm in the middle because I haven't seen any changes.  Maybe I need to start making things that are in higher demand, but I don't know what sells the best on Etsy.  I don't even know how to find that info out.  I've searched on google for a million different versions of the phrase, "what sells the most on Etsy" but have come up empty-handed every time.

I do know that I need better pictures.  I'm working on that.

I haven't heard from any Etsy buyers about whether or not they've noticed a better search or not, but I can imagine it would be quite better for them.

The thing is, though, is that if you go on the left-hand side of the Etsy home page and click on one of the categories like "Accessories" you still get the 'recent' search, and I bet its the same if you click on any of those other categories.

So 'recent' search sill exists, and will still play a part, but just not as large as it once did.