Getting found on Luma

What gets your work to the top of search? Here’s how it works, including the parts you can’t influence.

What matters most

How well your listing matches what someone searched for. It carries more weight than everything else on this page put together. We read your title first, then your description, then your tags and category, then your materials.

Everything below only reorders listings that already match. None of it can push an unrelated item above a relevant one.

The two levers you have on day one

These are the ones we’d point a brand-new shop at, because they need no sales and no reviews behind them.

Disclose your materials. Any material at all earns the lift. Twelve don’t earn more than one, so there’s nothing to game and no reason to stuff the field. It also puts your listing in the material filter shoppers browse with.

Add a process photo or a short clip. Same deal: one is enough, and having none is never held against you.

Together those two carry the same weight as your shop’s reputation: its reviews, issues and posting on time. That’s deliberate. A maker who shows their work should be able to compete with a maker who has been here two years.

One more thing worth knowing: the process-media lift is worked out the moment someone searches, not overnight. Upload a photo of your bench this afternoon and it counts on the next search.

What builds up over time

Worked out fresh each night:

• How shoppers respond to the listing. Sales and favourites, measured against how many people have viewed it. This one counts for the most. It’s smoothed too, so a listing needs a fair number of views before its own figures move it far.
• Your reviews. Average rating, smoothed so that one early review can’t define you.
• Issues decided against you. Only ones we actually found in the shopper’s favour. Raising an issue is not itself a mark against you.
• Posting on time, measured against the time you promised, over a rolling 90 days.

That last window is the important bit. A rough month ages out. Nothing here follows you around permanently.

New listings aren’t penalised

A new listing with no views and no sales counts as average, not zero. It also gets a small boost for being new, which fades over the following months. You’re not starting from the bottom and clawing up.

One shop can’t fill the page

Search shows at most six listings from any one shop, so a large catalogue can’t crowd everyone else out. The exception is when yours is the only shop matching, in which case you get the lot.

Suggestion rows on the home page are tighter still: one or two per shop, so newer shops get a slot.

What the shopper brings

If a signed-in shopper has favourited or bought things in a category, listings in that category get a small lift in their results. It’s worked out from what they’ve already done on Luma, nothing more, and it applies to every shop in the category equally.

What makes no difference

• Keyword stuffing. Repeating "gift idea perfect present" in your title works against you, because it dilutes the words that actually describe the thing. You can’t put "handmade" in a title at all. Every listing on Luma is handmade, so the word tells a shopper nothing, and we add it to the page title search engines read.
• Listing the same item twelve times in slightly different colours. The per-shop cap means you’re competing with yourself.
• Paying. There’s no promoted placement on Luma and no plan to add one.

A practical checklist

1. Write a title a shopper would actually type. "Hand-thrown stoneware mug, speckled blue" beats "Beautiful Handmade Gift Idea".
2. Fill in your materials, even if it’s one.
3. Add one photo of the work in progress.
4. Put dimensions, materials and care in the description.
5. Set each listing’s Posts within (days) for a busy week, not a quiet one, then post inside it.
6. Once Luma opens to shoppers, share your shop link. Search is one route in, not the only one. While we’re in beta, only you can open it.