How to list DTF transfers on Etsy

What category should I list DTF transfers under on Etsy?

Put a ready-to-press transfer in Craft Supplies & Tools, on the Image Transfers leaf: Craft Supplies & Tools > Canvas & Surfaces > Stencils, Templates & Transfers > Image Transfers.

The reasoning is what the buyer does next. They press your film onto a blank they already own. You are selling the material for a thing, not the thing. A transfer filed under a clothing category competes against finished shirts, and the shopper browsing finished shirts does not own a heat press.

Etsy picks the category by a numeric taxonomy id, not by the words in the breadcrumb. Mirra resolves that id from Etsy's live seller taxonomy by walking the name path, and deliberately never hardcodes the number, because Etsy can renumber a node between fetches. When a shop connects and has no category set yet, Mirra fills in this leaf and stops there: an id you already chose is never overwritten.

Category is not decorative. It decides which attributes Etsy offers you on the listing form, and it decides which shop filters your listing can appear under. Picking the most specific leaf that is actually true beats picking a broad parent.

One more field belongs in this decision. Etsy's API spec defines a listing type of physical, download, or both. If you ship a printed sheet of film, the answer is physical. Digital download is for selling the design file, which is a different product with different buyers and a different refund story.

Etsy can rename or move nodes inside its taxonomy tree. Mirra reads the tree live rather than storing a name, but confirm the leaf in your own shop before your first push.

Do I turn on the supply flag, and what does it actually change?

Turn it on. Etsy's API spec describes is_supply as the flag that tags a listing as a supply product rather than a finished one, and says it helps buyers locate the listing under the Supplies heading.

The spec also says something sellers miss: is_supply requires who_made and when_made. The three fields are answered together or not at all. You cannot set the supply flag and leave the maker questions blank.

Mirra defaults every new Etsy shop to the supply flag on, and the Etsy push sends that default through when the shop has not overridden it. That default is Mirra's call, not an Etsy requirement. The reason is the same one behind the category: a transfer is material the buyer uses to make something else.

Materials are a separate field, and Mirra sends the same three on every Etsy draft: PET film, water based ink, hot melt adhesive. Those describe a typical DTF sheet, and they are Mirra's default rather than a spec. If your supplier's film is built differently, change them.

Attributes vary by taxonomy leaf, because Etsy offers a different attribute set on each one. Mirra stores your required-attribute answers on the shop and applies them to every draft it pushes, so you answer once instead of once per listing.

What do I pick for 'Who made it?' and 'When was it made?'

Etsy's API accepts exactly three values for who_made, which are i_did, someone_else and collective, and when_made is an era list whose made_to_order option is the one most transfer sellers need.

Answer these about the physical transfer you ship, not about the artwork. If another shop prints your film, the honest answer is not i_did, and Etsy's production partner rules follow from that answer. The rules and compliance pillar covers where that leads.

Etsy's spec says who_made helps buyers locate the listing under the Handmade heading, and when_made does the same for the Vintage heading. That is why a wrong answer here is worse than a wrong tag: it files your listing under a heading that describes a different product.

Mirra does not let the model guess either field. Both are copied onto the listing from your shop's Etsy defaults at generation time, and the push prefers the value stored on the listing before falling back to the shop default. Two places to edit, one of them per listing, and nothing invented in between.

A practical trap: Etsy wants the enum value, not the label you see in its own web form. A shop configured with the display string in place of the value gets rejected at push. If a push fails with a validation error and the title and tags look fine, check this field first.

How long can an Etsy title be, and which characters are allowed?

Etsy publishes a 140-character title limit, and its API spec allows only letters, numbers, punctuation marks, mathematical symbols, whitespace, and the trademark, copyright and registered symbols.

Read the character rule as an allow-list, because that is how Etsy wrote it. The deny-lists that circulate in seller groups are incomplete guesses at the same rule. Anything outside those Unicode classes is rejected, which covers every emoji, decorative marks like stars and hearts, and currency symbols, since currency is a different Unicode class from mathematical symbols.

Four characters are legal but capped at one use each in a title: the percent sign, the colon, the ampersand and the plus sign. That list of four is verbatim from Etsy's own API spec. A title using one of them twice is rejected at the API, not quietly trimmed.

Etsy's help centre publishes the 140-character limit at help.etsy.com/hc/en-us/articles/115015628707. Its seller handbook separately offers guidance rather than rules: consider using fewer than 15 words, and avoid all-uppercase titles. Guidance does not get your listing rejected, so treat those two as style, not as gates.

Mirra adds house rules on top, and they are labelled as house rules inside the product. Every generated title has to carry DTF Transfer or DTF Print plus Ready to Press, and Mirra aims to get the design subject and the DTF phrase into the first 40 characters. Etsy's published advice is to lead with your strongest keywords. The number 40 is Mirra's, not Etsy's.

Hard limit: 140 characters

Published by Etsy at help.etsy.com/hc/en-us/articles/115015628707. It is a character count, not a word count.

Allowed: letters, numbers, punctuation, mathematical symbols, whitespace, and the trademark, copyright and registered symbols

From Etsy's API spec. Emoji, decorative symbols and currency signs fall outside the list and are rejected.

Once each: % : & +

Etsy's spec caps these four characters at one use per title. Most third-party summaries of this rule list three and drop the plus sign.

Guidance, not rejection

Etsy's seller handbook suggests fewer than 15 words and no all-caps titles. Neither is enforced by the API.

How many tags does Etsy allow, and what can go in one?

Etsy allows a maximum of 13 tags of up to 20 characters each, and separately recommends filling all 13.

The tag character set is narrower than the title's. Etsy's API spec allows letters, numbers, whitespace, the hyphen, the apostrophe, and the trademark, copyright and registered symbols. That is the whole list. Commas, ampersands, slashes, periods and hashtags are not in it, and a tag carrying one is rejected rather than cleaned up for you.

Twenty characters includes the spaces, which is the point. A tag is meant to be a short phrase a buyer would type, not a single word, and Etsy's own Keywords 101 article says tags should be multi-word phrases. Etsy also matches on root words, so a search for diaries reaches a tag that says diary. Spending two of your 13 slots on a singular and its plural buys nothing.

Mirra generates 13 tags every time and requires four of them verbatim: dtf transfer, ready to press, direct to film, heat transfer. That is Mirra's contract for this vertical, not an Etsy rule. Etsy publishes 13 as a ceiling and recommends using all of it.

Mirra also strips some words from generated tags, and it is worth being precise about why, because getting this backwards is common. Mirra removes handmade. Etsy does not ban that tag. Mirra removes it because a transfer printed on a machine you did not operate is not handmade, and a false handmade claim is a policy problem under Etsy's Creativity Standards. Mirra removes authentic, official and genuine on the same logic, and screens a list of brand names because brand words in tags attract intellectual property complaints. The risk is Etsy's. The word list is Mirra's, and it is a first pass rather than a clearance.

How many photos should a DTF transfer listing have?

Etsy's API spec accepts up to 20 images on a listing, and the first one is the thumbnail every shopper judges you by.

For a transfer, the photo set has a job that finished-product listings do not have: it has to stop the buyer expecting a shirt. Show the transfer itself, show it pressed onto a garment, and say the garment is not included in the image and in the first line of the description. Sellers who skip that spend their week answering messages about a missing shirt.

Mirra orders the gallery for you: the design first, then the mockups it renders, then any images you have pinned to the shop, such as a size chart or a press-settings card. Order is stored per image, so dragging one in the editor sticks.

Mirra's mockup compositor targets at least 2000 pixels on its output. That is Mirra's own floor for what it will hand you, chosen so the render is not the weak link in your gallery.

Mockups are computer-generated composites of your own artwork on a template you own or uploaded. That is a different thing from using someone else's product photo, and the distinction matters more than the file format does.

How do I charge a different price for each print size?

Use one listing with a size variation per print size rather than one listing per size.

Etsy prices variations through the listing's inventory: one offering per size, with price varying by the size property. Mirra models the same thing as a size-to-price table on the shop, and turns that table into the inventory call at push time. Set the ladder once and every listing in the shop inherits it, so you are not retyping four prices for every design.

A listing priced through variations carries no single scalar price, on purpose. Mirra's validator treats price as satisfied when every variation has a positive price, which is why an unpriced row blocks the listing rather than the listing looking fine and failing at Etsy.

Rows without a price are dropped from the inventory call instead of being published, because an offering at zero is a real thing Etsy will happily list. The size chart in the description is built from the same filtered set, so the description cannot advertise a size the buyer has no way to select.

Mirra ships a four-row DTF ladder as a one-click preset in the size editor: Pocket / Left Chest 4 inch, Youth 8 inch, Adult 11 inch, and 2XL and up at 12 inch. Those labels are Mirra's, not an industry standard. The preset is a button you press, never something applied behind your back, and the reason is unglamorous: a ladder seeded automatically would either overwrite a price you typed or publish offerings at zero, because the inventory call wins over whatever scalar price the listing carried.

The labels carry the print dimension on purpose. Adult 11 inch, not Adult. The size chart in your description is rendered from these labels, and a label without a measurement tells the buyer nothing.

Per-size prices are set through Etsy's own listing inventory API. The term 'Etsy' is a trademark of Etsy, Inc. This Application uses Etsy's API, but is not endorsed or certified by Etsy.

How do I stop the size chart in my description from going stale?

Mirra writes a {{SIZE_GUIDE}} placeholder into the description instead of a fixed chart, and expands it from your live size table every time a listing leaves the system.

The failure this avoids is quiet and common. A seller pastes a size chart into their description template, sells for six months, then adds a size or drops one. Every listing made before that day still advertises the old ladder. Nobody notices until a buyer asks for a size that is not in the dropdown.

So Mirra bakes the token, not the chart. Expansion happens at each point where text reaches a buyer: the Etsy push, the Shopify push, and the export ZIP for shops that upload by hand. Change your sizes and every description is already correct, with nothing to backfill and no bulk edit to run.

The Etsy path expands from sellable sizes only, matching the inventory call exactly, so the chart and the dropdown cannot disagree. If the size table cannot be read while an export is building, the ZIP writes an explicit notice rather than guessing at sizes, because a wrong chart is worse than a missing one.

The listing editor renders the same expansion in its preview, so what you read while editing is what the buyer reads. The token itself round-trips through the editor untouched, which means you can move it, or delete it if you would rather write your own chart.

Should an AI tool set my prices for me?

No, and Mirra's generator cannot: price is not one of the fields the model returns.

The generation step hands back a title, 13 tags and a description. That is the entire output. The file holding Mirra's generation prompts does not contain the word price anywhere in it, and the listing row created from a finished generation carries no price at all. Price arrives later, from the size-to-price table you typed.

The reason is not caution for its own sake. Your price is a function of your film cost, your printer's throughput, your packaging, your shipping profile and what your particular buyers pay. A language model looking at a PNG knows none of those. A number it produces would be a plausible-sounding guess, and a plausible-sounding guess about your margin is worse than no number, because it looks like an answer.

This is a reasonable thing to check in any listing tool you evaluate. If a price appears in a field you did not type, ask where the number came from. If the honest answer is that a model wrote it, that number is decoration.

What should the press and care block in my description say?

Say what your own film supplier says, because press settings vary by film, printer and press, so a temperature copied from a blog is a confident claim about somebody else's product.

Mirra composes each description in two parts: an intro written for that specific design, then a static block your shop controls. The block is the right place for press settings, care, and how ordering works, and it is editable per shop precisely so you can put your supplier's numbers in it.

The values Mirra ships in that block are house defaults with no cited standard behind them, and one of them is frozen for backwards compatibility rather than because it is right. Treat them as a template with the fields filled in, and replace the numbers from your supplier's spec sheet.

Whatever numbers you land on, the block should cover the same ground: a pre-press to drive moisture out of the garment, temperature and dwell time by fabric type, whether the film is a hot peel or a cold peel, a finishing press under parchment, and how long to wait before the first wash.

Peel type deserves its own line. It is a property of the film you bought, it differs between suppliers, and getting it wrong ruins the first press a buyer attempts. No generator can know it, which is exactly why it belongs in the part of the description you own.

Common questions