Most shoppers spend maybe ten seconds on your shop's about section and policies before making a purchase decision, which makes it tempting to treat that space as an afterthought — but that quick skim is still doing real trust-building (or trust-eroding) work, even in ten seconds, and it's worth being deliberate about what's actually there.
A short, genuine "who's behind this shop" note tends to outperform either a completely empty about section or an overly corporate-sounding one. Something as simple as a couple of sentences about why you started the shop, what you're personally into within your niche, or what you're trying to build reads as more trustworthy than silence — buyers are, on some level, buying from a person, even on a platform as large as Etsy, and a total absence of any personal context leaves that trust gap unfilled.
Shipping and processing time information needs to be genuinely accurate, not optimistic. If your POD provider's actual production time is 3-5 business days plus shipping, stating "ships within 1-2 days" because it sounds better sets up a guaranteed disappointment the moment a real order takes longer — and a frustrated customer citing a broken promise is a much worse outcome than one who was accurately told upfront and planned accordingly.
Return and exchange policy clarity matters even for POD sellers who don't hold physical stock, since a lot of shoppers assume (often incorrectly) that a small shop won't help if something goes wrong. Clearly stating what you'll actually do if a print comes out defective or an item doesn't fit (see our piece on handling print quality complaints) removes a real, if unstated, hesitation a lot of first-time buyers have before purchasing from an unfamiliar small shop.
A simple test worth running periodically: read your own about section and policies as if you were a stranger considering a first purchase, with zero prior context about your shop. If it reads as generic, evasive, or copy-pasted from somewhere else, that's worth revising — this is genuinely low-effort, high-leverage work compared to most other things you could spend an afternoon improving in your shop.