We get this question often, why are my Etsy sales different than my orders? Understanding the difference between Etsy sales vs orders is a little complicated, so we wrote this post to shed light on it.

High level, an Etsy sale is defined as any time a item is sold, but an order is any time a customer makes a purchase. So I customer A bought one item, and customer B bought two items, you would have two orders, but three sales.

So if your shop gets orders often with multiple items bought together, you will have a different Etsy sales vs orders number.

We’ve found in our data that on average, Etsy shops have about an 80% orders to sales ratio — meaning that 20% of orders contain multiple products.

What is the difference between orders and sales on Etsy

It’s kind of confusing how Etsy words this to be honest. So we understanding the confusion.

To reiterate, a sale on Etsy is any time an item is ordered and an order is any time a payment is made.

Visually it is easier to explain. Below is three customers buying different products with the result of total Etsy sales vs orders you’d have.

Customer A: buys 1 product from your shop in one payment

Customer B: buys 2 products from your shop in one payment

Customer C: buys 3 products from your shop in one payment

This would result in:

Sales: 1 + 2 + 3 = 6 Sales

Orders: 1 + 1 + 1 = 3 Orders

So you will always have more sales than you will orders.

What does the number of sales mean on Etsy?

The number of sales on Etsy tells you how many products have been ordered from your shop, but it doesn’t show you the amount of orders. You can only see orders from with your Etsy shop.

Most Etsy Shop have more sales than orders, and from our data we’ve found that on average 20% of a shops orders have multiple products in them.