Every Etsy seller has done it. You find a shop in your niche, see 14,382 sales next to the name, and start scrolling to work out which listings did it.
You won't find out by scrolling. Etsy shows the total and nothing underneath it. The bestseller badge is vague, the favourites count measures interest rather than purchases, and "in 20+ baskets" is a snapshot of one afternoon.
Buyers leave something behind after they purchase, though. With a bit of arithmetic, it tells you almost exactly where the sales went.
Reviews are the only public purchase signal
Only a buyer can review a listing. Every review is tied to the listing it was left on and dated. For any shop you can see:
- Lifetime sales, on the shop page
- Lifetime reviews, the number beside the star rating
- Every review, with the listing it belongs to
That's all you need. The idea behind it is simple: within one shop, buyers leave reviews at a fairly steady rate. If a shop has 14,000 sales and 2,800 reviews, about one buyer in five leaves a review. That doesn't depend much on which poster they bought.
So a listing's share of the shop's reviews is a good estimate of its share of the shop's sales.
The arithmetic
Step 1: the shop's review rate.
review rate = lifetime reviews ÷ lifetime sales
2,800 ÷ 14,000 = 0.2. One buyer in five reviews.
Step 2: count reviews per listing. Open the reviews tab and tally them by listing. For a big shop, use the last twelve months. It's more recent and it keeps the tallying manageable.
Step 3: divide.
estimated sales = listing reviews ÷ review rate
A listing with 31 reviews: 31 ÷ 0.2 ≈ 155 sales. A listing with 2 reviews: about 10.
Step 4: multiply by price if you want revenue. Use the listing's current price. If it has size variations, remember most buyers pick the cheaper sizes, so treat the result as an upper bound.
Always calculate each shop's own rate. Don't borrow a figure from another shop or a forum. Review rates vary a lot between shops: digital downloads, gift items, and shops that send review-request messages all get reviewed more often than a plain poster shop. A single rate applied to every shop gets every shop wrong in a different direction.
Where the estimate breaks
The method is only as good as its assumption, and there are four places where the assumption doesn't hold.
Small numbers. One review could mean 3 sales or 12. Don't rank listings with under about five reviews against each other. Group them as "sells a little" and move on.
Brand-new listings. Reviews arrive weeks after the sale, once the item has been delivered. A listing that started selling last month looks weaker than it is.
Mixed shops. A shop selling £3 digital files alongside £60 framed prints has two different review rates mixed into one average. The estimate for each group will be off in opposite directions.
Figures that disagree. If a shop has more reviews than sales, reviews were probably imported from somewhere else, or the sales count is hidden. Stop there. A rate above one doesn't mean anything, and every number you calculate from it will be wrong.
With those caveats, the ranking of listings is reliable even when the absolute numbers are rough. And the ranking is what you actually want.
What to do with the ranking
Knowing a competitor sold about 155 of one poster doesn't help much on its own. What helps is what the ranking shows.
Which niches carry the shop. Group the listings by subject. Many successful poster shops get most of their sales from two or three themes, with a long tail of listings that barely sell. The top themes are proven demand. The long tail is mostly experiments that didn't work.
What the best sellers have in common. Compare the top ten with everything else. Look at how the titles open, how many photos they have, whether there's a video, which sizes are offered, and the price. Differences that show up in all ten are patterns. Differences in one or two are noise.
Listings with lots of views and few sales. If views are visible, a listing with heavy traffic and hardly any reviews is losing buyers after the click. That's the same problem as favourites that never turn into sales, just in someone else's shop. You can learn from it for free.
Timing. Plot the review dates by month. You'll see the shop's seasonality, and it's probably yours too. If a travel-poster shop peaks every November, that's your Q4 prep deadline.
Doing it without a spreadsheet
For a shop with 40 listings, a spreadsheet and half an hour are enough. For a shop with 1,500 listings and 9,000 reviews, you won't finish the tallying.
That's what Dissect a store in psdmate is for. Give it a shop name and it reads the public listings and reviews, calculates that shop's own review rate, and estimates sales and revenue for every listing. It then groups the listings into niches and points out the best sellers, the hidden gems and the leaky listings. When the figures disagree, it says so and leaves the estimate blank rather than guessing. It uses exactly the method above, just without the hours of tallying.
The short version
- Etsy shows a shop's total sales, never the per-listing split.
- Reviews are tied to listings, and buyers review at a steady rate within one shop.
- Review rate = lifetime reviews ÷ lifetime sales. Calculate it for each shop.
- Estimated sales for a listing = its reviews ÷ that rate.
- Trust the ranking more than the absolute numbers, and ignore listings with fewer than five reviews.
- Use the ranking to find the niches, patterns and timing that carry the shop.
Frequently asked questions
Can you see how many sales another Etsy shop has?
You can see the shop's lifetime total. Etsy shows it on the shop page next to the shop name, unless the seller has hidden it. What Etsy does not show is how those sales split across listings, which is the number that actually tells you what sells.
How do you estimate sales for a single Etsy listing?
Work out the shop's review rate (lifetime reviews divided by lifetime sales), count the reviews left on that listing, and divide the listing's reviews by the rate. A listing with 12 reviews in a shop where one buyer in five leaves a review has sold roughly 60.
How accurate are Etsy sales estimates from reviews?
Good enough to rank listings within one shop, rough for absolute numbers. The method assumes buyers review at a similar rate across the whole shop. That holds reasonably well for similar products at similar prices and breaks down for tiny samples, very new listings, and shops that mix cheap digital files with expensive physical items.
Do Etsy sales tools use this method?
Most estimate from reviews in some form, because reviews are the only per-listing purchase signal Etsy makes public. The difference between tools is mainly whether they compute each shop's own review rate or apply one industry-wide guess to every shop.
Why would a shop's review rate be above one?
It shouldn't be. More reviews than sales usually means reviews were imported from another platform or a sales counter was hidden. When the figures disagree like that, no estimate is better than a wrong one.