How to use Alura Tasks: Established sellers & teams

This guide

When you first start, you'll have a General team already set up. For a larger operation, you'll want to go beyond a single team and create dedicated teams for each area of your business.

In Alura, Teams are how you divide your shop operations into manageable areas. Each team gets its own workflow statuses, labels, templates, recurring tasks, and members — so different parts of your business can work in ways that suit them, without stepping on each other.

For established Etsy shops, we recommend organizing teams by function:

You might not need all of these — and you might need different ones. The key is that each team represents a distinct area of responsibility with its own workflow.

You can rename and reconfigure your existing General team to serve as one of these (e.g., rename it to "Listings"), then create additional teams in Settings → Teams → Create Team. Each team gets a short identifier (up to 7 characters) that prefixes all task IDs — so LIST-42 immediately tells you it's a Listings team task.

Top tip: Share this guide with your team members once they're added to help them get up to speed.

Add members to each team in Settings → Teams → [Team] → Members. Each person can be on multiple teams.

Roles available per team:

Workspace-level admins can manage all teams regardless of their team role.

Each team has granular control over who can manage what. Configure these in Settings → Teams → [Team] → Access:

Our recommendation for larger teams: Set management policies to "Admins only" for settings and workflow, but "All members" for labels and templates — this gives your team flexibility without risking workflow changes.

Public teams are visible to everyone in your workspace, which is useful for cross-functional visibility. Private teams are only visible to their members.

Every team can have its own set of statuses, tailored to how that area of your business works. Configure in Settings → Teams → [Team] → Workflow.

Example: Listings team workflow

Example: Orders team workflow

Example: Marketing team workflow

Set a default status for each team so new tasks land in the right place automatically (e.g., "To Do" for Listings, "New Order" for Orders).

You can drag statuses to reorder them within each category.

In Settings → Teams → [Team] → Workflow, scroll to the automations section:

For stale task auto-close, you choose which status stale tasks should move to (e.g., "Won't Do") and the inactivity threshold.

Labels work at two scopes:

For established shops, we recommend a layered approach:

Workspace labels (shared everywhere):

Team-specific labels (examples for Listings team):

Manage labels in Settings → Teams → [Team] → Labels. You can archive labels you no longer need and drag to reorder them.

When your team runs the same type of work regularly, templates eliminate setup time and ensure consistency. Each template can pre-fill title patterns, status, priority, labels, assignee, due date rules, estimates, and even create sub-tasks automatically.

Configure in Settings → Teams → [Team] → Templates.

Listings team: "New Product Listing"

Title pattern: New Listing: {product name} Priority: Medium Labels: New Product, SEO, Photography Sub-task templates:

Listings team: "Listing Optimization"

Title pattern: Optimize: {listing title} Priority: Low Labels: Optimization, SEO Sub-task templates:

Marketing team: "Sale Campaign"

Title pattern: {sale name} Campaign Priority: High Labels: Promotion Due date rule: relative (e.g., 2 weeks from creation) Sub-task templates:

Orders team: "Custom Order"

Title pattern: Custom: {customer name} — {item} Priority: Medium Labels: Custom Sub-task templates:

When creating a new task, select a template and it populates everything for you — including auto-creating all the sub-tasks. Your team members don't need to remember every step.

Set up tasks that auto-generate on a schedule in Settings → Teams → [Team] → Recurring. Configure frequency (daily, weekly, monthly, yearly), intervals, and optional end dates or occurrence limits.

Recommended recurring tasks for established shops:

Each recurring task is generated from a template, so it arrives with the right status, priority, labels, and sub-tasks already in place.

When you're managing hundreds of listings, connecting tasks to the actual Etsy records they relate to is essential. Every task can be linked to:

This means your team doesn't need to guess which listing "Fix shipping dimensions" refers to — the link is right there on the task.

For complex work that involves multiple people:

When managing a large volume of tasks, select multiple at once and perform bulk operations:

This is particularly useful during seasonal transitions — bulk-updating all holiday listings tasks to "Archived" after the season, or bulk-assigning a new VA to a batch of tasks.

Create Saved Views that filter and display tasks in ways that matter to your team. Views can be private or shared with the workspace.

Example saved views for an established shop:

Switch between Table, Kanban, and List views. Group by status, priority, assignee, label, due date, or estimate to see your work from different angles.

When you're running a team, understanding how much work is on everyone's plate matters. Enable estimates in Settings → Teams → [Team] → General.

Recommended mode: T-shirt sizing (XS, S, M, L, XL) for most Etsy teams. It's fast and doesn't invite false precision.

Use Kanban grouped by assignee + estimates to see at a glance if anyone is overloaded.

Every task includes:

The activity log is especially valuable when multiple people touch the same tasks — you always know the full history.

Choose how tasks open when you click them:

If you're promoting someone to manage a team area, transfer team ownership in Settings → Teams → [Team] → Members. The current owner becomes an Admin, and the new owner gets full control.

When a team is no longer needed (e.g., you shut down a product line), you can retire it rather than deleting it. Retired teams are hidden from the main view but can be restored if needed.

If you do need to permanently delete a team, Alura shows you a summary of the impact (how many tasks will be affected) and provides a 30-day recovery window.

As your shop grows, you might evolve your team structure:

Stage 1 — Solo or tiny team: One team — your default General team (renamed or as-is)

Stage 2 — Small team with defined roles: Rename General and add one or two more teams (e.g., "Listings", "Orders & Support", "Marketing")

Stage 3 — Established operation: Specialized teams with dedicated workflows, templates, and recurring tasks for each

There's no penalty for reorganizing. When you move a task to a different team, Alura handles the status migration — mapping statuses from the old team to the new one.