Etsy listing checker for DTF sellers

Two things: the title you paste and the tags you paste. For the title it counts characters the way a length limit counts them, tests every character against the set Etsy accepts, and counts how many times each of the four single-use characters appears. For the tags it counts the tags, measures each one, tests each character against a second and much shorter set, and looks for repeats. That is the whole surface. Length, characters, repeats.

It never reads what your words mean. It does not know a brand from a bird, and it makes no judgement about whether a phrase is safe to publish. Anything that depends on meaning rather than on counting is outside what a page like this can honestly answer, so it stays outside.

Some rows are limits and some are advice, and the two never share a colour. Etsy's own wording for several of its keyword rules is “consider” and “we recommend”. A title of fifteen words publishes. Two tags that differ only by an s publish. Rows like those tell you where a slot is being spent twice. They are not failures.

Nearly every listing guide states this rule as a short ban: Etsy does not allow a dollar sign, a caret or a backtick in a title. Etsy states it the other way round. Its public API specification says a title may contain only letters, numbers, punctuation marks, mathematical symbols and whitespace, plus the trademark, copyright and registered symbols. That is an allow-list, and the difference is not academic.

A ban on three characters implies the rest are fine. They are not. A dollar sign is a currency symbol, which is not one of the categories on the list, and neither are the euro, pound, yen, degree, section or pilcrow signs. Nor is any emoji, star, heart or arrow, the decorations sellers reach for as separators. None of those appear on the popular ban lists. All of them sit outside what Etsy says a title may contain.

Read as an allow-list, the rule also tells you what is safe without anyone having to enumerate it. A comma, a hyphen, a full stop, brackets and an apostrophe are punctuation. A pipe and a plus sign are mathematical symbols. All of them pass, which is why this page does not warn you about a pipe the way some checkers do. The one thing worth watching is repetition rather than presence: the percent sign, the colon, the ampersand and the plus sign may each appear once. The plus sign is the one people miss, because most third-party write-ups of this rule list only the first three.

Because Etsy publishes two different character rules, and the tag one is much shorter. A tag may contain letters, numbers, whitespace, a hyphen, a straight apostrophe, and the trademark, copyright and registered symbols. That is the entire list.

An ampersand is not on it, and neither is a comma, a full stop, a plus sign, brackets, or the percent sign. The one that catches people is the curly apostrophe, the character a word processor or a phone keyboard substitutes when you type “mom's”. It looks identical at a glance and it is a different character. A tag that reads perfectly well can be rejected over it, which is exactly the kind of failure a checker is worth having for.

The tag ceiling of 13 is a ceiling, not a quota. Etsy recommends filling every slot, because an empty one is a search phrase you are not competing for, and a listing with fewer publishes normally. The 20 character limit counts spaces, so a three-word phrase runs out sooner than it looks like it should.

Every row carries a badge saying whether Etsy published the rule or Mirra chose it, and an Etsy row links to the Etsy page it came from. Open the link. Etsy's help centre blocks automated tools, so reading it yourself is the only way anyone confirms one of those sentences, and a checker that will not show you its source is asking you to take its word. Every source behind this page was checked on July 28, 2026.

Several widely repeated rules are missing here on purpose. One is the claim that a title must start with a letter or a number. Etsy's published character rule allows punctuation and whitespace anywhere in a title, so the rule is not even implied by the specification, and no Etsy page states it. Another is the claim that no word may repeat across two tags because the second one is wasted. That is a claim about how Etsy's search ranks listings, and Etsy publishes nothing of the sort. The lists of forbidden tag words that circulate in seller groups are the same story: Etsy's specification, help centre, seller handbook and policy pages were all searched for such a list and none was found. This page does not check any of them, because a checker that enforces folklore teaches you rules that do not exist and costs you slots that do.

One row is Mirra's own and says so. The tag “handmade” is not banned by Etsy, and sellers who make their items by hand use it correctly. Mirra strips it from the listings it generates for printed transfers, because a transfer that came off a machine is not handmade and Etsy's Creativity Standards are about describing an item accurately. If you made the item by hand, keep the tag. That is the point of labelling a house rule as a house rule: you get to disagree with it.

A single tick over a whole listing reads as a promise that the listing will publish, and nothing on this page can support that. It has seen a string and a list of strings. It has not seen your image, your category, your price, your shipping profile or your shop, and it cannot ask Etsy anything, because it never talks to Etsy. Etsy decides what publishes.

Per-rule answers are also more useful. Knowing that one tag is three characters over is something you can act on in ten seconds. Knowing that a listing scored 82 out of 100 is not. So each row states one thing, says whether it is a limit or advice, and shows where it came from.