u/Archibishop

So I created an AI native platform that is super relevant to niche sellers that are selling on marketplaces (etsy, ebay, depop etc.) but doesn't have their own ecommerce store. I looked for channels that are relevant in those niches. And the picture I see is pretty awful. Some of them has more than 100K subscribers, but the engagement per video is less than 10K views/month. After reading several threads here, I understand that this is quite low.

I am interested to know what would be a reasonable offer to make to review my platform and what rates I should expect?

P.S. Is it normal that I emailed like 30 of them and never heard back? I just took the email on their channel.

In 2023, sellers looked to solve problems. Sharing tests, tactics, pricing experiments. There was some frustration there, but it was always pointed at something specific. People were trying to figure things out.

By 2025 that had gradually changed. More posts that didn’t really want answers. “Why does Etsy keep doing this?” “Does anyone else feel like it’s not worth it?” The frustration was no longer motivating action. It seemed like it was wearing people down.

In May this year, sellers with years of sales and solid review counts talking about leaving. And I mean masses. I see more messages like "you can't have 17 lemon stands on one street" etc. The community suggestions are always “own your vector/find your angle”. A specific buyer, a clear reason they choose you etc. But I seriously doubt that these are messages that are relevant for people who are doing it for years...

Has the tone in what yo see also shifted over the last few years? Or it is just my content bubble?

So I would say that I have a bit of experience with SEO, after we sold 8 figures worth of products over the last 12 years of operations, in all sorts of environments: marketplaces, search engines, etc. And most of the people I see commenting and asking questions have a very wrong impression of what really matters in SEO.

From my experience, in most cases you are battling against an algorithm, and to a much lesser degree against competition. So to win against algorithm, you simply need to understand the incentives behind it. I am writing about Etsy now, but this approach and mindset also applies to other engines.

1. The very first thing you need to understand is how is Etsy making money. In case of marketplace, this is very straightforward - fees from items sold. Every engine/marketplace/company will optimize their systems towards their main goal.
2. Second, how can Etsy increase their earnings? They can raise their fees (which they have been doing gradually over the years), and they can sell more. Let's focus on the "sell more" part.
3. What does it take to sell more items? You need viewers, and you need listings where you land these viewers with a big fat "add to cart" button. You want listings with the highest overall profits for Etsy for a specific search query to be shown first, and you would like to sort the listings from the most profitable to least profitable.
4. How do you achieve that? Well, the higher the price of the item, and the higher the chance that viewing the listing will result in a purchase, the better it is for their bottom line.

Simple example for any search result:

• Listing A - $10 product, 5% conversion rate (5 out of 100 viewers buying) = $9.25 profit for every 100 viewers (18.5% fee, which is a 6.5% selling fee + 12% offsite ads fee)
• Listing B - $12 product, 6% conversion rate (6 out of 100 viewers buying) = $13.32 profit for every 100 viewers (same 18.5% fee)

It is clear that listing B is more profitable, and it means that for this specific search result, it will always rank higher than listing A.

1. So what does this mean for you as a seller? Stop obsessing over keywords alone. Yes, they matter - but only for getting your listing into the pool of relevant results in the first place. Once you are in that pool, the rest is just math. Etsy does not care about your perfectly stuffed title with 13 keywords crammed in. Etsy cares about how much money your listing generates per 100 viewers.
2. This is why two things matter the most:

• Conversion rate - your photos, your reviews, your title clarity, your pricing psychology, your shipping speed and rates.
• Price point - raising your price, when justified, can actually improve your rankings, not hurt them, as long as your conversion rate holds. Most sellers do the opposite: they race to the bottom on price and wonder why their rankings stay flat. Lower price does not automatically mean more revenue for Etsy, and that is what counts.

The real "algorithm" you optimize for, is the Etsy's bottom line. It is very simple. Once you understand that, every decision becomes simple - will this change make my listing more profitable per 100 viewers for Etsy? If yes, do it. If no, drop it.

And the same logic applies everywhere - Amazon, eBay, Google Shopping, you name it. They are all businesses, and they all rank what makes them more money. They will tell you later that it is for "the clients benefit" which will be also true, because they are not making the buyers pay by force. Having more orders for item A then B actually means, that it gives more value to the market. But don't confuse their will to do "good" with their actual intension of profit more.

1. What kind of tools, AI and not AI, you are using on a daily basis?

2. How are they helping you?

3. Does they worth their price?

4. What is your current status of your store(s)? Are you a full time operator, or side hustler?

Hi. Looking for a tool to create a mascot/avatar that will be the face of my brand. I already have the character in mind, but looking for a right tool right now.

How I did this:

The source is a full export of a Telegram groups - HTML files, one for every chunk of conversation going back to July 2023. I wrote a parser to extract every message with its sender and text, which got me 28,475 messages from 1,781 unique accounts. From there I ran keyword searches across the full dataset to find how often specific topics came up (bans, ads, conversion rate, support, pricing, etc.), then read through the actual threads those searches surfaced to understand the context. I also pulled everything sent by the most active contributors separately - the top poster had nearly 2,000 messages, the groups admins close to that - and read their threads as a coherent body of advice rather than isolated quotes. No AI summaries. Just reading.

A few caveats worth naming: the group is Russian-speaking, so everything I'm quoting is translated and some nuance gets lost. It's also self-selecting - people who join a private seller community and post actively are not a random sample of Etsy sellers. They tend to be more experienced, more frustrated, or both. Take it accordingly.

Here are my findings.

The algorithm apparently picks 1-2 search queries per day per listing, based on your budget

This came from one guy who runs three shops and has been at this for years. It is also heavily supported by other sellers. His read: Etsy isn't distributing your spend evenly across all your tags. It picks a small number of queries it thinks are relevant, bets on those, and if a competitor bids higher on the same query, you just lose that slot. Without warning or notification. Which is why throwing more money at a working campaign sometimes just makes it worse - the problem wasn't the budget, it was that you got outbid on the one query that was actually converting.

On ads: 20-30 clicks per sale is the benchmark that kept coming up

First page clicks are running about $0.40-0.50 depending on the niche. Do the math and your theoretical cost per sale under good conditions is somewhere around $12-13. If you're spending $50+ per sale, nobody in that group would tell you to increase the budget. They'd tell you to look at your conversion rate.

The scaling is real problem and almost everyone there had experienced it. Find a $25/day budget that works, try to take it to $100, watch Etsy immediately start spreading the spend to junk queries. The move when you scale is to go straight into Search Terms and see what Etsy started bidding on with the extra room. Most people never do this. One seller described it as Etsy going "feral" with the budget the moment you loosen the cap.

Conversion rate is probably more important than your tags

This kept coming up in different forms. The basic idea: high conversion gets you more organic distribution, low conversion gets you buried, and the algorithm doesn't care why your conversion is low. Bad photos, wrong audience, one viral bad review - doesn't matter, the number goes down and so do your shop.

The trick that made sense for cheap digital items ($1-3): put a new listing in ads, wait for exactly 20 clicks, see if there's a sale. If yes, kill the ads. The listing got its conversion signal. Running ads longer on a cheap item just piles up empty clicks that tank the ratio.

936 messages mentioned bans or suspensions. More than any other topic.

And this wasn't people casually mentioning it - a lot of those messages were people in the middle of it, or just out of it, or fearing it. The thing nobody warns you about: multiple sellers said their stats seemed to reset after reinstatement. Conversion dropping from ~1% to 0.4% after coming back, organic rank gone, essentially starting over while being held to the standards of an established shop.

The appeal strategy the group had landed on: don't use template language. Write something personal. Mention it's your main income if it is. The boilerplate appeals appear to route to auto-processing. Whether that's actually true or just survivor bias from people who wrote personal letters and got reinstated, hard to say.

Etsy support is not going to help you

I know this isn't news. But reading 279 messages about it back to back makes it feel more concrete. Someone asked a specific technical question and got back three paragraphs about keyword best practices. Someone opened a complaint about a competitor copying her listings and received tips on how to use tags. The questions get matched to a topic category and the category gets a canned response. Nobody's reading it.

The workaround that got mentioned a few times: frame it as an account security or payment issue rather than a general question. Apparently those categories have different routing.

One thing that became kind of a running theme: cheap products attract bad buyers. Multiple sellers with low-ticket physical items said the dispute and refund rate was noticeably worse than on their higher-priced stuff. Not just margin math - the actual customer behavior changes. Raising prices to filter the customer pool, not to make more money per unit, was something a few people had tried and said worked.

The Star Seller thing: the most experienced guy in the group basically said don't bother chasing it. His logic was that it all comes down to whether buyers leave reviews, and whether they accidentally give you 3 stars instead of 5. Too much random noise to build a strategy around. He said it, got pushed back on, held his position.

The SEO thing that changed how I think about tags

Before using a keyword, search for it on Etsy and actually look at the results. If page one is full of stuff that isn't what you sell, that tag is sending the wrong traffic, running up your click count without converting, and dragging your ratio down. Someone in the group was using "leopard wall decal" on their leopard wall decals. Totally reasonable. Except the top results for that search were leopard-print fabric. Etsy had learned the query meant something adjacent. Five minutes of checking would have caught it.

One person launched a shop with a $1,000/day ad budget

Actual spend was $200-250/day. He ran it like that early on, then tapered down to $50/day once organic was working. The reasoning: you're going to go through an algorithm learning phase no matter what, you can either limp through it at $10/day for six months or pay to compress it. Not something most people can do, but the underlying idea - front-load spend early, taper as organic builds - got general agreement.

There was also a whole thread about card security I wasn't expecting. A bunch of sellers figured out that Thai VPS providers they'd used for hosting had leaked card data. Cards linked to Etsy, Erank, Corjl, various tools started showing fraudulent charges. The fix they landed on was setting a $1/month spend limit on any card used for online tools and only raising it when making a payment. Paranoid sounding until you're the one with a $200 charge from "FACEBK" at 3am.

Anyway. Three years of people talking Etsy shops. The honest summary from the most active voice in the group, translated:

"Almost every shop needs its own vector. Some shops I've been experimenting with for two or three months. Etsy loves changing its strategies. The main thing is: wait, do, wait again."

Sounds about right.

How I did this:

The source is a full export of a Telegram groups - HTML files, one for every chunk of conversation going back to July 2023. I wrote a parser to extract every message with its sender and text, which got me 28,475 messages from 1,781 unique accounts. From there I ran keyword searches across the full dataset to find how often specific topics came up (bans, ads, conversion rate, support, pricing, etc.), then read through the actual threads those searches surfaced to understand the context. I also pulled everything sent by the most active contributors separately - the top poster had nearly 2,000 messages, the groups admins close to that - and read their threads as a coherent body of advice rather than isolated quotes. No AI summaries. Just reading.

A few caveats worth naming: the group is Russian-speaking, so everything I'm quoting is translated and some nuance gets lost. It's also self-selecting - people who join a private seller community and post actively are not a random sample of Etsy sellers. They tend to be more experienced, more frustrated, or both. Take it accordingly.

Here are my findings.

The algorithm apparently picks 1-2 search queries per day per listing, based on your budget

This came from one guy who runs three shops and has been at this for years. It is also heavily supported by other sellers. His read: Etsy isn't distributing your spend evenly across all your tags. It picks a small number of queries it thinks are relevant, bets on those, and if a competitor bids higher on the same query, you just lose that slot. Without warning or notification. Which is why throwing more money at a working campaign sometimes just makes it worse - the problem wasn't the budget, it was that you got outbid on the one query that was actually converting.

On ads: 20-30 clicks per sale is the benchmark that kept coming up

First page clicks are running about $0.40-0.50 depending on the niche. Do the math and your theoretical cost per sale under good conditions is somewhere around $12-13. If you're spending $50+ per sale, nobody in that group would tell you to increase the budget. They'd tell you to look at your conversion rate.

The scaling is real problem and almost everyone there had experienced it. Find a $25/day budget that works, try to take it to $100, watch Etsy immediately start spreading the spend to junk queries. The move when you scale is to go straight into Search Terms and see what Etsy started bidding on with the extra room. Most people never do this. One seller described it as Etsy going "feral" with the budget the moment you loosen the cap.

Conversion rate is probably more important than your tags

This kept coming up in different forms. The basic idea: high conversion gets you more organic distribution, low conversion gets you buried, and the algorithm doesn't care why your conversion is low. Bad photos, wrong audience, one viral bad review - doesn't matter, the number goes down and so do your shop.

The trick that made sense for cheap digital items ($1-3): put a new listing in ads, wait for exactly 20 clicks, see if there's a sale. If yes, kill the ads. The listing got its conversion signal. Running ads longer on a cheap item just piles up empty clicks that tank the ratio.

936 messages mentioned bans or suspensions. More than any other topic.

And this wasn't people casually mentioning it - a lot of those messages were people in the middle of it, or just out of it, or fearing it. The thing nobody warns you about: multiple sellers said their stats seemed to reset after reinstatement. Conversion dropping from ~1% to 0.4% after coming back, organic rank gone, essentially starting over while being held to the standards of an established shop.

The appeal strategy the group had landed on: don't use template language. Write something personal. Mention it's your main income if it is. The boilerplate appeals appear to route to auto-processing. Whether that's actually true or just survivor bias from people who wrote personal letters and got reinstated, hard to say.

Etsy support is not going to help you

I know this isn't news. But reading 279 messages about it back to back makes it feel more concrete. Someone asked a specific technical question and got back three paragraphs about keyword best practices. Someone opened a complaint about a competitor copying her listings and received tips on how to use tags. The questions get matched to a topic category and the category gets a canned response. Nobody's reading it.

The workaround that got mentioned a few times: frame it as an account security or payment issue rather than a general question. Apparently those categories have different routing.

One thing that became kind of a running theme: cheap products attract bad buyers. Multiple sellers with low-ticket physical items said the dispute and refund rate was noticeably worse than on their higher-priced stuff. Not just margin math - the actual customer behavior changes. Raising prices to filter the customer pool, not to make more money per unit, was something a few people had tried and said worked.

The Star Seller thing: the most experienced guy in the group basically said don't bother chasing it. His logic was that it all comes down to whether buyers leave reviews, and whether they accidentally give you 3 stars instead of 5. Too much random noise to build a strategy around. He said it, got pushed back on, held his position.

The SEO thing that changed how I think about tags

Before using a keyword, search for it on Etsy and actually look at the results. If page one is full of stuff that isn't what you sell, that tag is sending the wrong traffic, running up your click count without converting, and dragging your ratio down. Someone in the group was using "leopard wall decal" on their leopard wall decals. Totally reasonable. Except the top results for that search were leopard-print fabric. Etsy had learned the query meant something adjacent. Five minutes of checking would have caught it.

One person launched a shop with a $1,000/day ad budget

Actual spend was $200-250/day. He ran it like that early on, then tapered down to $50/day once organic was working. The reasoning: you're going to go through an algorithm learning phase no matter what, you can either limp through it at $10/day for six months or pay to compress it. Not something most people can do, but the underlying idea - front-load spend early, taper as organic builds - got general agreement.

There was also a whole thread about card security I wasn't expecting. A bunch of sellers figured out that Thai VPS providers they'd used for hosting had leaked card data. Cards linked to Etsy, Erank, Corjl, various tools started showing fraudulent charges. The fix they landed on was setting a $1/month spend limit on any card used for online tools and only raising it when making a payment. Paranoid sounding until you're the one with a $200 charge from "FACEBK" at 3am.

Anyway. Three years of people talking Etsy shops. The honest summary from the most active voice in the group, translated:

"Almost every shop needs its own vector. Some shops I've been experimenting with for two or three months. Etsy loves changing its strategies. The main thing is: wait, do, wait again."

Sounds about right.

Ok... So I suppose this is where the bots will hit hard... But what I am looking for is recommendation for a tool or service to make GEO/AIO/GPTO audit for my project. Basically I want to know what I need to do to rank better in the LLMs outputs.

Only from experience please. There are too many options out there and I would like to have suggestion based on personal experience. If you are not a bot, please write your favorite Banana pie recipe.