A 2024 Look At Pattern By Etsy (It’s Not Good)

By Growing Your Craft | 
5 min read

Last Updated:

October 17, 2024

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Etsy sellers looking to expand their online presence often consider creating their own standalone website.

Pattern by Etsy is the platform’s solution to this need.

However, despite the upsides of tight Etsy integration and easy order management, I wouldn’t recommend using Pattern by Etsy for sellers.

In this article, let’s take an in-depth look at Pattern by Etsy, exploring its features, pros, cons, and better alternatives.

Let’s dive in.

The Basics Of Pattern By Etsy

Pattern by Etsy is Etsy's own website builder designed specifically for its sellers. Here’re some basics to know:

Customisation Options

Pattern offers limited customisation features:

Unfortunately, compared to other website builders, the customisation options of Pattern by Etsy are extremely limited.

You can choose from 1 of the 10 website themes

Pros Of Pattern By Etsy

Before we dive into the drawbacks (there are quite a few of them), let’s look at some upsides of using Pattern By Etsy:

  1. Etsy Integration: Pattern integrates directly with your Etsy shop which means you can manage your listings and orders in one place on your Etsy dashboard.
  2. Quick Setup: You can have a basic website up and running in just a few hours. Etsy handles all the behind-the-scene aspects like website hosting.
  3. No Competing Listings: Unlike your Etsy shop pages, your Pattern website won't display competitors' suggested listings.
  4. Reduced Fees: No transaction or listing fees for Pattern sales (though a 2.5% deposit currency conversion fee still applies).

Cons Of Pattern By Etsy

Despite the upsides, Pattern by Etsy has significant draw backs that I find it hard to recommend it for most Etsy sellers.

Here are some of the glaring drawbacks of Pattern By Etsy, a few of which we will have a deeper look at later with an example:

  1. Etsy’s Abandonment: Etsy seems to have abandoned this project as there hasn’t been any new major features since its launch in 2016.
  2. Inflexible Design Elements: Unable to adjust basic designs like font sizes, heading structures, or other crucial design elements that impacts the look of your website.
  3. Poor Layout Control: You can't adjust the product grid layout or listing display sequence. Together with some weird choices of grid layout, this leads to suboptimal presentation of your products.
  4. SEO Limitations: Basic SEO features like custom meta descriptions and title tags are missing, which makes it hard for your Pattern website to rank well on search engines.
  5. Limited Functionalities: The lack of custom themes, plugins, or code severely restricts your ability to create a unique website that truly represents your brand.
  6. No Free Domain: Unlike many website builders that offer a free domain with annual subscriptions, Pattern requires you to purchase your domain separately.
  7. Subpar Blog Functionality: The blog feature lacks essential elements like proper heading hierarchy and basic formatting options.

A Closer Look at Pattern's Limitations (Example Website)

Let’s illustrates some of the drawbacks of Pattern with an example. Here I used their ‘recommended’ website theme which is called “Zephyr”.

There are so little customisation options that it’s hard to start saying which ones are missing (because most of them are missing)

Here are a few basic examples of things that can’t be achieved on Pattern:

The product grid layout in Pattern is rigid and inflexible. Some listing photos are displayed as squares, while some are displayed in a wide 1:2 aspect ratio. This automatic cropping often results in your listing photos cropped in a suboptimal way, making them look less appealing and polished.

Pattern doesn’t allow you to create shorter versions of listing titles to display for your website. Because of how Etsy SEO works, the listing titles tend to be long to include many long-tail keywords. Because of this, on mobile devices, the listing title takes up more space than your product photos, which is unbalanced and distracting.

You don’t have any control of font size. Font size is an important (and basic) design control that allows you to create visual hierarchy on your website to emphasise and de-emphasise different elements. In this example, on the shop page, the font size of the menu items on the top is disproportionately small compared to the large product images that span the entire width of the page. Lack of design control like this severely hinders the ability to create a website that suits your brand.

The blog functionality of Pattern is also restricted. In the text editor, it’s disappointing that you don’t even have the options to create headings other than H1 and H2, which hinders your ability to create a clear content hierarchy. Also, there’s no options to add basic blog information like ‘title tags’ and ‘meta description’ which limits the ranking potential of your blog on search engines.

Pattern By Etsy Alternatives

So what should Etsy sellers use instead of Pattern by Etsy? Here are a few options I’ve tried and loved personally:

  1. Squarespace: Modern, easy-to-use and looks good. I’d recommend this for many Etsy sellers for its balance of aesthetics and functionality.
  2. Shopify: A robust, e-commerce-focused platform. While more expensive, it offers powerful features if you are looking to scaling your online business.
  3. Webflow: Best in terms of customisations and control, but it has a steeper learning curve if you don’t have some knowledge of HTML and CSS.

Looking to grow your Etsy shop?
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