Etsy’s $100M Bet: Why "Gifts" are the Only Way to Win in 2026 and How to Find Unsaturated Gifts

Added: 2026-05-14

[00:00:00]Stop trying to find the perfect product.

[00:00:02]In on demand does not matter as much as the occasion and the recipient. I've watched shops with okay designs outperform best-in-class designers 10 to 1 purely because they mastered the gift keyword strategy. Today, we are deep diving why gifting is a crucial element of your Etsy print on demand strategy and some of the micro gifting categories that are rising to the top so that way you can make sure that your products are showing up on that first page for gifts.

[00:00:31]If you're tired of the spray and pray method, this video is your blueprint.

[00:00:35]Nowadays, positioning your product as a gift, especially on Etsy for print on demand, is no longer a can have or a wish list strategy. It should be your go-forward opportunity, especially if you are a new shop and you don't have a lot of reviews and ratings and shop data. This is the way that you can start to break into Etsy print on demand, and I'm going to tell you exactly why.

[00:00:58]Number one is the in- tent to buy conversion gap. So, if you are somebody that is going onto Etsy and typing in blue sweatshirt, you're in more of a browsing mode. You're probably not ready to buy right then and there. You're looking for shopping, you're window shopping. If you are searching for 30th anniversary gift, you are on a deadline.

[00:01:18]The clock is ticking. And so, you are likely going onto Etsy because you have a product that you have to buy because of an upcoming event. Let me ask you, which you think is going to have a higher conversion rate? You've probably guessed it, and it is going to be the person that is looking for that 30th anniversary gift because they know that they have this opportunity coming up that they have to purchase something for. The second reason why having a gifting strategy for your Etsy print on demand shop is crucial is for higher average order values. The data has shown that gifts that are positioned as a keepsake or a thoughtful gift command prices that are 15 to 25% higher than generic goods. The reason this is is because they are emotional. People are not just buying this because they want it for leisure, they're buying it because they're giving it to a loved one and there's more of an emotional tie to that and typically when emotion is involved, you can command a higher price point. Number three of the four reasons of why you need to be locked in on gifting, especially for Etsy, is because in 2024 Etsy launched this new thing called gift mode. They have positioned themselves as the destination for gifts and so when people come to their platform most of them are searching for a gift. And to supplement this, they have launched this gift mode hub, which is an AI first hub, that will help surface additional listings that are within the same criteria that a customer is searching for. They are doing this for the sellers. So, this is another way that you can get your products in front of buyers for free. If you are ensuring that you are including gift within your titles in the first 40 characters and you are stuffing as many gift centric tags into your 13 tags as possible. This means it'll show up in these different like gift ideas carousels and home page placements that other people that don't have these are not going to be placed for. And lastly, I think a lot of you are typically like, "Hey Meg, yeah, but Mother's Day is super crowded. Christmas is super crowded." And you're absolutely right. If I'm just trying to bid on or have a product in the Christmas gifts category, I'm probably not going to show up. But you know what I probably could show up for? Divorce gift, new driver celebration gift. Today, I'm going to walk you through how you find all of these more niche micro moments and we've seen data that proves that folks are coming to Etsy and buying these moments that are more specific and nuanced and not a specific holiday that's on the calendar, but still incredibly important to them. So, two additional things I want to walk you through and how you actually activate on this. Let's say you are new to print on demand, but you are kind of looking for a niche and a category to launch into, choose a very specific gift category. I myself did this explicitly when I launched my own print-on-demand businesses, and it's not the first time I'm telling you all this.

[00:04:01]I started designing for like bride gifts and bridesmaid gifts, and it was not specific, it was not nuanced, it was just generic, and it was bad. I got zero sales. It took me 3 months to get my first sale. And the way my first sale came in is I had this product that said, "Be my bridesmaid" or whatever. It was like a funny bridesmaid gift. And somebody messaged me, and they're like, "Hey, can you put onto that instead of maid of honor, man of honor?" And I was like, "Absolutely." I I had the ability to customize this on my screen, so I got them the new listing and published that listing, and they bought it immediately.

[00:04:34]I got my first five-star review, and that got me thinking, "Okay, the market for bridesmaid and maid of honor gifts is very saturated, and I'm a new shop.

[00:04:42]Nobody's going to buy my products, but what if I can corner into that market of man of honor or groomsman category that nobody was really designing for?" And maybe there there were people designing for it, but this was just another way to be shown on page because if I'm going to be even on the first page of 100 listings, that's going to help me as opposed to you having to keep scrolling through 10 pages before you find my product. So, this strategy worked perfectly for me, and there are so many more of these like micro moments or specific individuals that you could categorize on, and that's what we're going to talk about today and how you find those. So, today I am partnering with Everbee you how I keyword source for these categories. Absolutely do your research, go onto Claude, go onto Gemini, go onto ChatGPT, ask for what these micro moments are. Follow my channel, I'm typically posting Pinterest Trends Reports, Etsy news articles on all the different types of moments that are popping up. So, follow along if you're interested in that, I'm going to keep doing that. But if you want to do this research on your own, I'm going to show you exactly how I do my research flow. I have been partnering with Everbee since I launched my business, well, technically 90-ish days after I launched my business, which is really what helped me get my business going to be able to actually do research on what is performing well on Etsy. So, it is a back-end plugin that allows you to see some stats and data on how different listings are trending across Etsy. In addition to seeing those listings, they also have this tool in their platform that allows you to do some keyword research. Now, this data is directional.

[00:06:11]It is not perfect, but it is better than nothing and it gives us some guidance on where we should be allocating our efforts so we can work smarter, not harder, especially because we're trying to make it rain. So, on Everbee, in the flyout, I'm typically spending most of my time in product analytics, but today, I'm going to go a little bit off road and I'm going to go over to their keyword research. So, on their keyword research, you're going to see a bunch of different keywords and you're going to see a couple of different statistics in here. Again, this data is directional, so keep that in mind, but what the volume is going to show is going to be the average monthly searches for the keywords on Etsy. And then, the competition is going to be total listings competing for the keyword. So, as you can probably assume, we want to be finding keywords and categories where the competition is low, but the volume is high. And that's typically hard because if a keyword becomes high enough volume, people have typically listed products for it. So, there are still going to be these moments that are constantly coming out, but this is one way that I take a look at this data. So, what I will do is I will type in the keyword that I'm interested in. Today, I'm just going to do gift because, as you know, we're talking about gifts here. And I'm going to sort the competition from lowest to highest. So, what this does is it immediately just shows me the types of keywords in here that has basically no listings live for it, but there has been a little bit of searches for those specific keywords.

[00:07:31]Obviously, this is probably not where you want to spend a lot of your time because, while yes, you may show up for these, there's just not a lot of commercial intent happening here, but it's kind of interesting to take a look at. Some of these I'm like, "Hey, maybe there there would be some opportunities here." But, the first one being biotechnologist gift. That could be something that you could play in more often. Youth Minister gift. I like these not because I'm going to make an entire brand based off of it. But, if there's a Youth Minister gift, you can probably expand that into way more gift categories of just pastor gifts and things of that nature. So, it gives you an idea on other keyword research you could do given that the volume here is limited. But, I want to do a little bit of filtering here so we can still have some stuff with commercial intent. So, I'm going to go ahead and put the minimum searches at 50 and just see what pops up. Okay. So, off the top, you're going to see a lot just like misspellings and things that just don't make a lot of sense. Obviously, that is because people are still probably typing things into the search bar here, but it's not going to be exactly what we want to be looking at. But, there are some terms that immediately rise to the top that are interesting to me that I'd want to pay more attention to. And I will actually favorite them in the platform so I can come back to them later. So, a couple of them are going to be this one, Halloween gift box for her Halloween. This gives us plenty of time to start designing in the Halloween gift box category, as well as Nurses School gift. I assume that this is probably a lot more saturated, but something for us to take a look at later on as well.

[00:09:02]Coastal Bachelorette gifts. This one's probably just a misspelling, but it's very interesting that we're seeing that one pop up as well. So, this I like to get an idea on where we're not seeing a ton of competition, but again, it's just one area for me to kind of start to spot check and take a little peek at what is potentially populating here in the keywords that do not have as much competition as other terms. So, then I will switch this up a little bit more and instead of searching by competition lowest to highest, I'm going to do volume highest to lowest and I'm just going to put a cap on the competition that I'm willing to compete with. So, by doing that, I'm going to leave my volume at sorted highest to lowest, and on competition, I am going to put a maximum of let's just say 100 listings, which you may think sounds like a lot, but in reality, that's not a lot of listings. I could probably get up 100 listings on a specific category within a day. So, it's it's really not that crazy of an opportunity. And next, I'm going to sort my volume because I want to get out some of these ones that are just probably anomalies or kind of funky to 5,000 searches. Okay. So, then from here, you're able to do a couple of really fun and exciting things. I will exclude like the dash and then just allow for all of the data to filter in here, but what you'll find is that some of these terms will have things like gifted or giftful, which are other platforms, so it kind of skews the data from what I typically like to look at. So, what I'll do is I'll take a look at this information, and I'll try I'll kind of get a vibe of like what's kind of populating to the top. There's typically going to be more saturation for these terms, but it still it gives you an idea of where there's still opportunity. Gift and the pet loss category is really rising to the top.

[00:10:43]I've seen it populate three to four times in the last 2 minutes that I've been doing this this research. Petful lost gift as well. Pet gift personable memorial. So, people are really wanting to remember their pet, and this isn't category that has a ton of emotional value tied to it. So, people are buying this for themselves when a pet passes away, or uh friends and family members are buying gifts for them when their pet passes away. It's like a family member.

[00:11:10]So, as I mentioned earlier, when we're designing for these moments of uh emotion, this is where you can really show up for these customers and ensure that you're providing them service. We can do everything personalized and customized with print on demand. There's all types of AI tools that will help you if you're not comfortable designing here yet, but it gives you an idea of this is one category where I would absolutely be designing for today if I was launching a new print on demand business. And the other hack that I'll give you for this strategy is all this data is here, but sometimes I don't want to like comb through and look at it all. So they allow you to export this data. So I will export this data and I will pop it into Gemini or if you have ChatGPT or Claude, whatever you utilize for your AI little coworker, I pop into there and I say, "Hey, exclude all of the terms that have gifted, giftful, and things that might not be related to actual gifting moments and show me the trends of keywords that have high opportunity and low competition." And it will summarize that data for me. And so then I get to work on designing products for these categories. That's exactly what I would recommend you do. And especially if you you already know you have a category in your mind that you're interested in or you already are designing in one of these categories, do this and get the keywords that you are not utilizing already and beef up your listings with those. We don't have to work harder, we have to work smarter, and this will take you 5 minutes to go ahead and do this. I will drop you a link to every in the description below. They're completely free to sign up, but you may have to upgrade to get access additional tools.

[00:12:35]So I will drop that in the description below. I went ahead and I downloaded that, I popped it into Claude, and as I gave you the guidance to do, I said, "Hey, here are some categories that I'm kind of thinking of. Go through the data, show me which ones have the best print on demand opportunity. Keep in mind that not every single one of those search terms is going to be able to be done print on demand. Cross-reference that with what you're seeing have increasing trends across the web. Look at Pinterest trends, reference Google Trends, and give me ideas for products that I could launch in this category that would work well for gifting." Plot twist, I also asked the platform to cross-reference Printify and Printtonic to show me the types of products that would fit well in this category. Once again, I truly don't believe that it is a product that's going to take you from point A to point B. However, it's important that we know kind of how these things fit in. So a couple of the categories that Claude called out was one, friendship anniversary gift. [music] I loved this idea. We see a lot of good success with anniversary gifts and boyfriend gifts and things of that nature, but over the last several years we've seen this interest in Galentine's Day and wanting to celebrate micro-moments. And so having a friendship anniversary set, I think is perfect. Claude gave me a few ideas. So on Print Tonic, which is the newer print on demand platform that originally had just candles through the Lumian brand and is sold on Printify, launched Print Tonic where you can actually do customize gift sets. So this is one where I was hard to think about and they give you this kind of like idea, which is their mug duo gift set. It comes with also a custom candle and you can include that folded card and then design like a super cute folded card. So just gives you so many good ideas for how you could play around with this. And then also, as I'm sure a lot of you noticed more recently, Printify launched the ability to make it more easy to do bundled listings. So that way you don't have to like do all the skew matching and things of that nature. Um if that's interesting to you and you want to know how to do that and you haven't already seen it from other YouTubers, let me know in the comments and I'll make sure to do a tutorial there. But it makes it easier now for you to launch a listing that has like hers and hers crew neck sweaters and then makes it easier to purchase those all within one, especially if they're coming from the same print provider. So I love the friendship anniversary opportunity here. And then the second one that I loved was this new driver first car gift set. This is one of those micro-moments that I know when I was when I turned 16, I was so stoked.

[00:14:58]I celebrated man. We were like, we're going out. I definitely bought a lot of stuff for my car and a lot of things that were going to be able to make the car my own. And so I love this idea too because everybody turns 16. So it's a good way to capitalize on a lot of people. And the two kind of categories that they noted here would be for Print Tonic, there's a way to combine their keychains as well as that card. And then with Printify, there's keychains and custom mugs and things of that nature.

[00:15:28]You can kind of play around with here, too. So, two really great opportunities that I think would do well. And this is just the tip of the iceberg. You can do this every single week to see which new micro moments are popping up. And if you have designs that are already working in your shop and you are an existing shop, you can utilize the same strategy to take those best winning designs and just push them over for these other gifting moments. Or at the very least, make sure that you are including these gift terms in your listing tags, so that way you can show up in as many places as possible on Etsy that they will put you for free. If this is helpful, please drop a comment, a like, a subscribe, turn on your notifications. I post videos every week talking about how to start your print on demand business or scale your print on demand business, and I will catch you on the next one.