Etsy is looking to make things easier on sellers as the holiday shopping season approaches. The company has announced some new shipping changes with “linked” shipping profiles, an improved bulk editor and tweaks to the shipping upgrades offered by its prototype team.

This follows some other recent, important moves from Etsy, including giving sellers a new shop dashboard, changing the way reviews work, adding the ability for users to follow pages, changing seller guidelines, offering phone support, expanding the availability of gift cards and launching an appeals program for suspended accounts. These are all changes made just in the past two months leading up to the holiday shopping season.

“First, we’re linking Shipping Profiles and listings so that when you change a Shipping Profile, those changes will automatically be reflected in related listings,” writes Etsy’s Brittany Williams in a blog post. “Once you’ve linked a Shipping Profile to a listing (you’ll have to do this one time), you can then edit that profile in the future, and the shipping settings will automatically change. No more editing shipping on a listing by listing basis! Linking a listing with a Shipping Profile is a one-time process that you can complete either via your listings page or the Listings Manager with our new bulk edit tool (more info on that below).”

“As an example, if you have a Shipping Profile for your T-shirts and need to increase their shipping price by $1.00, you can do it in one fell swoop by visiting the relevant Shipping Profile,” she adds. “It’s that easy.”

The new bulk editor appears in the listings manager, and lets sellers grab multiple listings, and apply shipping changes. The search tool will help you find a group of products that have the desired common trait. When listings are linked to the right shipping profiles, they won’t need to be edited on a listing-by-listing basis.

Etsy has made changes to shipping upgrades to tailor them to sellers’ businesses, enabling sellers to create a set of additional shipping settings that buyers can add to their orders during the checkout process. This is still in prototype, so you have to join that for access.

Etsy says it will continue to evaluate its shipping tools and listen to feedback about them, but after these, don’t expect any more changes to be made until after the new year at the earliest. That’s probably a good thing to avoid confusion throughout the holiday shopping season.

Etsy added 1,040,120 new members in September alone, while also recording 1.81 billion page views for the month. 2,898,770 new items were listed during the month.

Image: Etsy