Etsy Will Email a Discount to Shoppers Who Almost Bought — Two Hours After They Leave

Someone put your item in their cart last night and didn’t check out. You can’t see who they were, you can’t message them, and Etsy will never tell you. That is the single most frustrating gap between selling on Etsy and selling on your own site — no customer list, no abandoned-cart email, no way to follow up.

Except Etsy does send that email. It sends it on your behalf, to a shopper you will never see — but only if you have switched the campaign on and attached a discount to it. It’s called a targeted offer, it lives one click deep in a page most sellers only open to run a sale, and it has four separate versions with four different timers. Every number below is from Etsy’s Help Center articles How to Set Up Sales and Discounts for Your Shop, Why Aren’t My Targeted Offers Sending to Shoppers? and How Etsy Funded Coupons Work For Sellers, read on 19 August 2026.

What a targeted offer actually is

Etsy’s definition is precise and worth reading literally: you “create promo codes that are automatically emailed to shoppers who have shown interest in your items,” and the shopper then enters that code at checkout. So it is not a discount Etsy applies for you — it is a coupon code, delivered by email, that a human being has to notice and type.

You set it up under Send offers to interested buyers on your Sales and discounts page (Shop Manager → Marketing → Sales and Discounts). Unlike a sale, nothing about it appears in search results or on your listing page. It is invisible to everyone except the person who receives the email.

Four campaigns, four timers

Here is the part nobody reads. Etsy’s article says “there are 3 types of targeted email offers” and then lists four — the troubleshooting article’s expiry table lists four as well, so the “3” is a documentation slip, not a fifth type you’re missing. Each one behaves differently:

• Abandoned cart. If a buyer has an item from your shop in their cart for more than 2 hours, they get an email offering a discount on it. A buyer can receive this type once every 2 days, and Etsy includes up to 12 eligible abandoned cart offers in a single email. The code expires 60 days from its creation date. (Secondhand guides circulate a 24-hour figure for this trigger. Etsy’s own article says two hours.)
• Favorited item. If a buyer has favorited an item in your shop, they get an email offering a discount on it — again once every 2 days, up to 12 different discounts per email, expiring 60 days from creation.
• Interested shopper. The vaguest of the four, and Etsy explains how it picks: it “determines interested shoppers using a number of factors, including how often and how recently they’ve viewed your listings.” This one is throttled hard — a buyer can receive it once every 30 days, the code expires 7 days from creation, and it can only be used once.
• Thank you. Sent after a buyer has purchased from you, once the order is completed, to encourage a second order. It expires 1 year after it’s sent — by far the longest runway of the four.

Read the throttles as a ranking of how warm Etsy considers each audience and the design makes sense. A cart and a favourite are strong signals, so those get a two-day cadence and two months to convert. “Viewed your listings a few times” is a weak signal, so it gets one email a month and a seven-day fuse. Someone who has already paid you gets a full year, because the cost of reminding a past customer is close to zero.

The rule that can make your offer worth nothing

This is the trap, and it is one sentence in Etsy’s article: buyers can redeem one targeted offer at a time, and if a listing is already on sale when a shopper receives a targeted offer for it, only the highest discount will apply at checkout.

Run that against a shop with a permanent 20%-off sale — and plenty of shops have one — that also has a 10% abandoned-cart campaign running. The email still goes out. The shopper still gets a code. The code does nothing, because the sale they can already see is larger. You have spent the one contact Etsy allows you every two days delivering an offer that cannot beat the price on the page.

If you want the targeted offer to do work, it has to be worth more than what a stranger already sees. That is an argument against the permanent shop-wide sale generally, which we made from a different direction in the piece on whether running a sale boosts your search ranking — a sale is a discovery tool aimed at strangers, and a targeted offer is a closing tool aimed at someone who already found you. Set both to the same depth and the second one is decoration.

One exception, from the same article: free shipping does stack. If you run a free-shipping promotion alongside a list-price discount, a shopper can apply both to an order that qualifies for each.

Why your stats page looks empty when it isn’t

Etsy has a whole help article for sellers convinced the feature is broken, and the first cause it lists is not a bug at all: your Sales and discounts stats default to “This month.” Change the dropdown to All time and the campaign that looked dead usually isn’t. Given that these codes have 60-day lives and fire on shopper behaviour rather than on your schedule, a calendar-month window is close to the worst available frame for judging them.

The second cause is the honest one, and it caps what this feature can ever be worth: some shoppers opt out of Etsy marketing emails, so targeted offers might not be delivered to every eligible shopper. You cannot see the opt-out rate, you cannot see the recipient list, and you cannot see who abandoned the cart in the first place. So treat this as free upside on an audience of unknown size — not as a channel you can forecast. Anyone quoting you a cart-recovery percentage for Etsy is quoting a number Etsy does not give sellers.

For what you can measure, the performance breakdown under Sales and discounts reports orders with a discount, items sold, average order value, and revenue from discounts, over a date range you choose. Offer details and stats shows which offers are currently live and how long they run.

Switching a campaign off leaves a 60-day tail

Ending a campaign is not the same as ending the discount. Etsy is explicit: if you end a targeted offer campaign, no new offer codes will be sent — but codes that were already issued may still be redeemed until they expire. With a 60-day expiry on the cart and favourite campaigns, a discount you switched off in September can still land on an order in November.

That matters for Q4 planning specifically. If you intend to sell at full price through the holiday rush, the campaign needs to stop roughly two months ahead, not the week before. And one more caveat straight from Etsy: it “may adjust the mechanics of targeted offers from time to time, including eligibility criteria, frequency, and discount types.” Every timer above is accurate today and none of them is a contract.

The coupons that aren’t yours — and cost you nothing

A related thing worth knowing, because sellers see these on receipts and panic: some discounts your buyers use are funded by Etsy, not by you. Etsy occasionally promotes a public coupon code for a set window — its own example is 48 hours over a weekend or a holiday, in set geographies — and it also emails private coupons to individual buyers.

Etsy’s statement on the money is unambiguous: both public and private coupons are fully funded by Etsy, and the seller receives the full order amount. You pay the same seller fees you would have paid without the coupon, and you can see when an Etsy-funded coupon was used and how much Etsy covered in the order details in Shop Manager. Enrolment is automatic if you’re on Etsy Payments — there is nothing to switch on.

Two details with real consequences. First, refunds: when you refund an order that used an Etsy coupon, Etsy shows you a notification of the amount to be refunded to Etsy on the refund confirmation page — Etsy takes its funded portion back, so the refund is not simply the number the buyer paid. Second, if you have Share & Save turned on, Etsy says an eligible sale made through your trackable link during one of these promotions earns 4% of the order total minus the promotional discount. The two programs combine, on a slightly smaller base.

What to actually do with this

A sensible order of operations, given that all four campaigns cost nothing to run:

• Turn on the thank-you offer first. It reaches people who have already paid you, it has a full year to convert, and it is the one least likely to be swallowed by a competing sale.
• Set your targeted discount above your standing sale, or drop the standing sale. If the code can’t beat the price already on the page, the email is wasted contact.
• Read the stats on “All time,” not the default month, before concluding anything about whether it works.
• Stop campaigns around 60 days before any period you intend to sell at full price, because issued codes outlive the campaign that issued them.

And the honest ceiling: every one of these four audiences is made of people who already found your listing. A cart, a favourite, a repeat view, a past order — none of it exists until Etsy search shows your item to somebody in the first place. Targeted offers close a sale that is nearly made. They do not go and find one.

That earlier job comes down to the same three constraints: a title under 140 characters with the phrase a buyer actually types inside the first 40, and 13 tags of up to 20 characters each that don’t repeat one another, as laid out in our breakdown of Etsy’s tag and title limits. ListingLoom writes to exactly those numbers — one listing at a time on the free plan, or up to 25 products in a single submission through the bulk generator on Pro (POD) at $19/mo. Get found first, then let Etsy chase the carts.