Etsy Shops > Secrets of the Etsy Color Picker

Secrets of the Etsy Color Picker

Posted: Lis on Aug 13 | Etsy Buzz

This week’s Etsy Bloggers theme is Carnival of Colors. Etsy’s color picker tells you to “pick a color, any color,” and offers to “find items to match.” Anyone who has used the tool knows that this isn’t always the way it works; sometimes you get an item photo that doesn’t have the color you picked anywhere in it. For my Etsy Bloggers entry, I decided to try to figure out why color picker errors happens, and what sellers can do to ensure that their items come up for the correct color.

How it works

When you add your photos to your Etsy listing, Etsy samples a tiny bit of that photo for color, and encodes it as a hexidecimal value in the database. This color sampling is done for each of the photos in a listing. When you click on one of the colored dots in the color picker, it displays up to five random listings that have the same or very similar hexidecimal color values to the dot that you clicked.

Why it goes awry

If you have a photo of your item on a colored background, your item could pop up in the color chooser when someone clicks on that background color. Because color sampling is done on all five photos, even if your first photo has a plain white background, if your second through fifth photos have a colored background, this may cause your item to appear in the color picker for the background color. For example, this listing appeared when I clicked on a deep royal blue dot, and this listing appeared when I clicked on a peach dot.

Because of the background-color phenomenon, the accuracy of the color picker is greatly reduced for colors that are frequently chosen as photo backdrops. Light (almost white) blue returns a ton of false hits because it is frequently the background color that results when sellers attempt to take photographs on a white background. Black, another popular background color, has an error rate around 90% (for every one black item, you get nine non-black items on black backgrounds).

If you have a photo of something other than your item as one of your five photos, or a graphic image, your item could be pulled up in the color lister for those colors. For example, this listing appears when you click on bright green because of the coupon in the fifth photo.

Getting it back on track.

According to Rob, you can “go back and edit your item listing and change the photos — the color picker will immediately find the new photos.” So, what can you do to improve the chances of your listings appearing for the correct color in the color picker? Here are a few ideas:

• Put a thick colored border around one of your item photos. See the first photo in this listing for an example of this technique. Photos like this one, which popped up when I clicked on bright blue (hex #304EC2), suggest that color is being sampled from somewhere along the outer edge.
• Include a relevant graphic image, predomanantly made up of the correct color, as one of your item photos. See the third photo in this listing for an example.
• Add a color swatch to your listing. Use the eyedropper tool to pull the predominant color out of your item photo and make a 1000×1000 square graphic of only that color. Add it as your last listing photo.




• If you want to add coupons or other graphics to your listings, use a white background or a background color that matches your item color. This will reduce the chances that your item will appear for the wrong color in the color picker.

Be sure to check out the Bead Jewelry by Shopgirl blog to see the rest of the Etsy Bloggers entries for this week’s theme!

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