I would not worry about ‘moving things to the back’, because Etsy brings things from ‘the back’ right up to the front again when they get to their four month renewal or are ready to expire, I often find I sell things in clusters from the very back of my listings as they are actually being shown to customers first.
Sections are by far the best way to keep things in the order you want them, if colour is important then you can have a separate section for black belts say, when the customer clicks on that it will show them all. The best change I have made recently as an experiment was to create a ‘new in’ section, I have found it by far the best way to separate out my new stock from the older stock and I am definitely getting more sales in that section as my customers want to see my fresh stock first. Mine is a little random as I have quite an enormous pile to work through, but I could target it- for instance my ‘new in’ could be all in one line. I keep 30-50 items in it and move things back into their regular sections after around three weeks. So for instance this keeps them at the top of my most recent listings, so if I only listed pink flower postcards and wanted those to appear together first I’d just bulk list those as ‘new in’, then move them to regular sections rather than ‘the back’. ( you can do this in quick edit)
Holiday items such as Easter and Christmas naturally drop back in Etsy search anyway.
When I am buying on Etsy I have different criteria so I may click on a shop and look at most recent first, or even highest/lowest price, so it doesn’t make any difference what you do in terms of merchandising, Etsy can completely override it.
As a bit of background I did used to be the buyer/ merchandiser/ window dresser for four of my dad’s shops, so I do get it! I also want my shop to look good, however more than that I want things to sell, and am aware that this is the internet not a b&m store so it’s much more ad hoc and chaotic and I stopped worrying about it.
