IMPORTANT: When you are doing market research on Etsy, keep in mind that Etsy shows personalised search results and suggestions that could skew your analysis. I’d recommend using an incognito browser when doing research, and open a new incognito browser after browsing 20-30 pages.
Gauging demand is important if you want to find a profitable niche on Etsy. By checking, you can avoid wasting time going into niches that have little to no demand, and instead focus on niches that you’ll have a higher chance of finding success.
We will first go through how to do market research without using Etsy research tools like Alura or eRank. If done properly, doing it manually using my Etsy Niche Discovery System will give you better insight than using tools. The downside is that it will take a little bit of time.
The Etsy search bar is a powerful tool that reveals real Etsy shopper data. The suggested keywords are based on what actual shoppers type in.
That means, if a keyword appear in the Etsy search bar, it usually means that there is decent demand for the keyword.
Based on that, type in all your broad keywords from Chapter 2 one-by-one in the Etsy search bar. If your broad keyword doesn’t get suggested from the search bar, it’s likely that the demand is not high enough. And that niche can be discarded.
Note: there are some rare cases when they may eliminate a great niche. For example, ‘lego keychain’ is not a popular search on Etsy, but this product is a bestseller. So be mindful when eliminating niches this way.
Get your coffee or tea ready, because this is a big step and would take a little bit of time.
One difficulty of estimating demand on Etsy is that Etsy doesn’t tell you the actual sales of individual listing. And because of that, most other Etsy courses tell you to ‘guess’ the demand by looking at the Etsy search bar, listings with the bestseller badge, etc. Those are all good options if you want to get a general impression of a niche, but when it comes to comparing a few different niches, the comparison based on general impression becomes murky and inconclusive.
One of the best piece of information you can get about the level of demand on Etsy is product reviews, specifically the reviews for the listing you are viewing. And that’s what you’ll use to estimate the level of demand for a niche.
First, search your keyword in the Etsy search bar.
Then go through all the listings on page 1 & 2, and add the reviews those products have. ONLY count the ‘review for this item', but not the review for the whole shop.
Ignore these two types of listings:
For each of the type 2 listings that you ignore, you should add another listing on the page 3 of the Etsy search to replace it. You don’t need to replace the ads that you ignored.
I recommend only doing the process for 2 pages of each keyword. Although it’s true that the more pages you include in your calculation, the more accurate the estimate would be, doing so would be very time-consuming as you may have 20-30 keywords to go through.
Repeat this process for every keyword that you have.
The total number of reviews of all relevant listings on page 1 & 2 gives you an estimated demand for that keyword. The higher the number, the higher the estimated demand is for that niche.
With that number, you can rank your keywords from high demand (represented by high number of reviews) to low demand (low number of reviews).
I recommend ranking broad keyword and niche keyword separately.
Theoretically, counting the number of bestsellers in a keyword would work as well, but one of the problems is that the bestseller badge is sometimes hidden on the search page when that particular listing is on sale. Also, you’d be counting a listing with 1,000 sale the same as a listing with 10,000 sales, given both of them have a bestseller badge, which doesn’t give you an accurate picture of the demand on Etsy.
At the end, you should have 2 list of keywords (broad and niche) ranking from high demand to low demand.
In the next chapter, you’ll learn another method to understand the competition level of your keywords. So that you can use the data to compare different niches to see which ones you should enter.