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Etsy is known for its marketplace of handcrafted goods, but despite that human touch, the company wants its shoppers to adopt AI.
On Tuesday, Etsy launched a beta version of its app in the OpenAI-owned ChatGPT. Once connected to the ChatGPT Etsy app, all you have to do is tag @Etsy and provide a prompt for it to generate results that can be compared or opened on the Etsy website.
In an Etsy News blog post, Chief Product and Technology Officer Rafe Colburn wrote that the ChatGPT app “offers shoppers a deeper view into sellers’ items” and can help when nuance matters.
“At the same time, the Etsy app in ChatGPT is poised to give us earlier insight into the moments Etsy is relevant in a shopper’s journey, opening the door to understanding how and when shoppers choose to use conversational search,” Colburn wrote.
In other words, while the ChatGPT Etsy app helps customers locate specific items, it also provides Etsy with information about when people choose to use both ChatGPT and Etsy while shopping.
I took ChatGPT’s Etsy app for a test run
After connecting the Etsy app, I told @Etsy that I’m looking for a handmade birdhouse under $50. It responded with five listings showing the item name, price, seller name, rating and whether there’s free shipping. There were also buttons above the listings I could click to filter by handmade, personalized, under $25 and free shipping.
I found it interesting that I could filter by “handmade,” even though that was a keyword in my prompt. When I selected the filter, only one result disappeared: a PDF for a DIY birdhouse.
What it looks like when you use the Etsy app on ChatGPT to find a handmade, under-$50 birdhouse.
However, I received these same filter options with different prompts — a birthday gift for a cat-loving friend and a Mother’s Day gift under $100 — so they seem to be there by default. One exception: For the Mother’s Day gift under $100, the filter for “under $25” changed to “under $50,” meaning it will increase as your budget increases.
When I clicked “view details” under a listing, I was, as promised, taken to the item’s page on Etsy.
Under the ChatGPT results, it noted that some birdhouses are merely decorative and not functional for birds, and that shipping can push the total cost to over $50. It also listed the two results most practical for birds, along with their prices and shipping costs.
To narrow down my options or find sturdy, weatherproof birdhouses, ChatGPT said I could tell it more about the birds I want to attract and whether I want a birdhouse for decoration or actual nesting.
On the other hand, the Etsy website allows me to filter by physical items, those that ship from the US, different birdhouse materials and styles, specific bird species, features such as weatherproof and squirrel-proof and more.
This isn’t Etsy’s first ChatGPT rodeo
When ChatGPT launched Instant Checkout in September to allow people in the US to purchase products through ChatGPT, Etsy was the first partner. Six months later, in March, Modern Retail, a media brand covering the retail industry, reported that both OpenAI and its retail collaborators had pulled back on the feature.
An Etsy spokesperson told Modern Retail that while the Instant Checkout integration did get potential buyers to see Etsy products and drove referral traffic, Etsy did not see “a large volume of sales.”
When asked why it launched the ChatGPT app after the previous Instant Checkout integration failed to drive sales, a representative for Etsy didn’t immediately respond.
Etsy’s AI future
As Etsy continues testing its ChatGPT beta app, it’s using what it learns to design a similar conversational experience on Etsy. “It’s still early, but we’re iterating quickly and learning from real usage what’s actually valuable to shoppers,” Colburn wrote.
In a photo shared within the blog post, an AI chatbot called Gifting Assistant is shown helping someone find a Mother’s Day gift under $150.
A sneak peek at Etsy’s Gifting Assistant in beta.
With this context, it would seem that Etsy’s ChatGPT app is less about driving sales and more about the company figuring out how to design its own AI tools.
(Disclosure: Ziff Davis, CNET’s parent company, filed a lawsuit against OpenAI in 2025, alleging it infringed Ziff Davis copyrights in training and operating its AI systems.)
