How Many Variations Can You Have On An Etsy Listing? | A Simple To Understand Guide

  • By: Reece Williams
  • Date: September 24, 2022
  • Time to read: 3 min.

Creating your listings is one of the first tasks when you create a store on Etsy – and getting it right is often very tricky. In fact listing setup and structure is one of the things new sellers get wrong.

Setting up listings isn’t as straight forward as creating a new listing for each type of item you sell. You will often need to use variants to handle slight differences between the things you sell – size, colour and material are three common variation types.

So once you’ve identified your variations, the next question will be “how many variations can I have on an Etsy listing?”. Lets take a look.

How many variations can you have?

You can have a maximum of 2 variant types (for example size, colour, material), with a maximum of 70 options between them.

If you offer different options for an item within the same listing, you can add those options as variations. You can offer up to two types of variations for each listing.

https://help.etsy.com/hc/en-gb/articles/115015664047-How-to-Add-Variations-for-Your-Listings?segment=selling

This means you could have 2 variation properties of size and colour, with a total of 35 options per variation property.

Sellers have been asking for more variation types for years, but with no luck. Having only 2 slots does force sellers to really consider how they structure their listings, as a listing with more than 2 options could get confusing for buyers, putting them off making a purchase.

Does Etsy charge for each variation?

No, Etsy does not charge for each variation created. Etsy charges $0.20 per listing. This is charged regardless of how many variations there are on the listing.

Again, when an item is c[purchase, or is renewed you will be charged $0.20 to relist it – but this is charged for the listing and not for the variants.

How to setup variants on Etsy?

The first step in setting up your variants on Etsy is to sit down and consider what variants do you need? Questions to ask are:

  • does this listing need variants at all? Don’t go adding variants just to save 20 cents on a new listing
  • how can I group these differences. Common differences, such as size and colour are obvious, however there is no restriction on how you want to split up variants on a listing.
  • Make sure you only have 2 variant types, and 70 total variant options. These are the limits set by Etsy.
  • Can you simplify it? Just because you can create 2 variant types doesn’t mean you should. Simplify the choices for the customer, and they will be more likely to find what they want

Once you have your lists just can set these up in the listing admin. For this step simply follow my guide on how to add listing variants on Etsy.

Conclusion

Variants are a great way of splitting up slight differences in items without having to create loads of listings.

Follow the steps in this guide and you will be well on your way to getting the optimal set up for your store.