Let me be clear from the start: I’m a fan of third-party Etsy tools. I use them. I recommend them. eRank, Marmalead, and Alura have helped countless sellers—including me—understand the Etsy marketplace, find better keywords, and spy on what’s working for competitors.
But after five years of selling on Etsy and watching my revenue drop from $16,000 to $700 while I was back in school, I needed more than marketplace trends. I needed to understand what was happening in my shop. And that’s where these tools hit a wall.
What These Tools Do Really Well
Before I get into the gaps, let’s give credit where it’s due.
Market Research: Want to know what’s trending on Etsy? What keywords have low competition? What price points are working in your niche? These tools deliver.
Competitor Analysis: You can peek at other shops, see their bestsellers, estimate their sales, and reverse-engineer their tags and titles.
Listing Optimization: They’ll grade your listings, flag missing tags, and tell you if your title is too short.
Search Visibility: I genuinely love eRank’s “first page” feature that shows which of my listings made it to the first page of search results. That’s gold.
For understanding the Etsy ecosystem as a whole, these tools are invaluable.
The Problem: They Can’t See Inside Your Shop
Here’s what most sellers don’t realize—these tools only have access to Etsy’s public API. That means there’s a whole category of data they simply cannot touch.
What they can’t access:
- Your actual sale price after discounts. If you sell a $29 item at 50% off, eRank still shows $29. Not the $14.50 you actually received.
- Your daily views, visits, and conversion rate. That lives in your Etsy dashboard and isn’t available through the API.
- Which search terms are actually bringing shoppers to YOUR listings. They can estimate marketplace-wide search volume, but they can’t tell you what’s driving traffic to your shop specifically.
- Your advertising performance. Etsy Ads spend, ROI, cost per click—completely unavailable.
- Your real listing performance over time. They get lifetime views as a single number, not the daily trends that show you what’s working now versus last month.
What They Show Instead
This is where it gets tricky, because these tools do show you numbers. But the numbers aren’t always what you think.
| What You See | What It Actually Is |
|---|---|
| Sale price | Listing price (before any discounts) |
| Estimated sales | Guesses based on review counts and favorite changes |
| Search volume | Estimates—Marmalead actually uses Pinterest trends to infer Etsy demand |
| Competitor sales | Extrapolated from public signals, not actual data |
| Listing grades | How well you follow best practices, not how Etsy’s algorithm ranks you |
When you connect your shop, they can pull your transaction data—but it’s still the listing price, not what hit your account.
Why This Matters
When sales are down and you’re trying to figure out why, you need specific answers.
- Which listings are dead weight?
- Where am I leaking money to discounts and fees?
- What activities actually move the needle—new listings, renewals, keyword changes, promotions?
- Which traffic sources are converting and which are just vanity metrics?
Marketplace trends can’t answer these questions. Only your actual shop data can.
And here’s the frustrating part: Etsy’s dashboard has this data. You just can’t download it. You can’t manipulate it. You can’t compare it over time in any meaningful way. You’re stuck staring at charts you can’t export.
Why I Built Tinker Trends
I didn’t set out to replace eRank or Marmalead. I set out to fill the gap they can’t.
I needed tools that would help me:
- See my real revenue after discounts and fees
- Export the traffic and keyword data Etsy won’t let me download
- Identify which listings are underperforming and why
- Track what actions actually lead to sales—not just views
Data is everything. And while I love knowing what’s happening on Etsy as a whole, when I want to fix my shop, I need my numbers.
Why My Geeky Heart Started Tinker Trends
I’m not a programmer. I’m just one of those irritating people who looks at a problem and thinks, “There has to be a way to do this.” And now, with AI as my assistant, I can actually figure it out.
I started tinkering—asking questions, experimenting, building out simple ways for anyone to track their shop information in real, actionable ways.
Understanding my data changed everything.
Here’s an example. Have you ever looked at your Etsy payment account statement and thought, why wouldn’t they list the product title? Why obscure it behind some random listing ID that Etsy assigns? It’s maddening. You’re staring at rows of numbers and codes, trying to figure out which products are actually making you money.
Guess what? There’s a stupidly simple solution.
Change your SKUs to the listing ID.
I know, it sounds crazy. But here’s what happens when you do: suddenly you can match your listings to your order items to your statements. You can compare everything to everything. You can finally see which listings are costing you money instead of earning it.
No fancy software. No coding. Just a simple change that unlocks the ability to understand your business at a glance.
That’s the kind of thing Tinker Trends is about—practical, unglamorous solutions that actually work. Built by a crafter who got tired of guessing.
The Bottom Line
Use eRank. Use Marmalead. Use Alura. They’re great for what they do—researching the marketplace, finding keywords, analyzing competitors.
But don’t mistake marketplace data for shop data. When you need to understand what’s really happening in your business, you need tools that go deeper.
