How it counts

One rule in three parts. The third was learnt the hard way.

What counts as comparable

Two listings are comparable when all three of these are true:

1. they share at least two of the same tags,
2. their prices are within 40% of each other, and
3. they are priced in the same currency.

Etsy gives a seller thirteen tag slots and most fill them. One tag in common (“handmade”) is noise; four is nearly the same object. Two is where a thing stops being coincidence.

Forty percent is wider than it looks, on purpose. Handmade prices for the same kind of thing scatter badly, and a tighter band would report almost everything as irreplaceable — which is a comforting lie in the direction that costs money.

The currency rule is not fussiness. Without it the band compares bare numbers, so a ring at 60 rupees sits happily inside the “42 to 98” band of a $70 one and gets reported as something you could buy instead. There is no way around it: Etsy publishes no exchange rates — both /currencies and /exchange-rates answer 404 — and the search’s own currency_code setting is ignored. Measured on 20 August 2026, asking for GBP, for USD, and for the nonsense code ZZZ all returned the same results in eight different currencies. So prices in another currency are not converted here, and not guessed at either. They are left out, and counted separately.

When there is no number at all

Sometimes almost nothing Etsy sends back is priced the way your item is. A bowl listed in Hong Kong dollars came back with sixty-two plausible results in euros, pounds, dollars, Australian dollars and francs, and not one in Hong Kong dollars.

The honest answer there is not a number. Counting only what could be compared would say “as good as one of a kind” — which is the reading that makes somebody buy in a hurry, and it would be wrong. So when fewer than half the results share your item’s currency, this page shows a dash instead of a count and says why.

What the number means

It is a count, not a judgement. There is no rating, no scoring, no recommendation and nothing personalised anywhere in this app. Whether a thing is worth having is your business; how easily it could be replaced is a fact, and this is it.

Most things here are made once

Which is why “sold” on Etsy usually means gone rather than out of stock, and why waiting for a restock is usually waiting for ever. When something you saved sells, this searches its stored tags and sends you what is nearest that still exists.

And when there is nothing, it says so. An email offering three vaguely similar objects because it had to offer something would be worse than useless — the useful message is that this was the only one.

The number moves while you think

Nothing about the thing you saved changes. The things like it sell, one at a time, and it quietly becomes irreplaceable. You are told when the count falls below half of the widest it has ever been for that listing — proportional, because thirty down to twenty is nothing and five down to two is the whole decision.

A thing that is still easy to replace is never called scarce, however far it has fallen. Forty alternatives down to twenty is still forty alternatives too many to worry about.

How the counting is spread

Everything saved is re-checked every day in a single request — that is the cheap part, and it is what catches something selling.

The comparable count is re-measured for one item a day, oldest first. A list of twenty is fully refreshed every twenty days, and the cost of a person’s list stays the same however long it gets. Anything that sells is measured immediately, whatever its turn.

Where the tags come from

The listing’s own, read when you saved it and never refreshed. That is deliberate: once it sells, Etsy stops returning it, and those stored tags are the only remaining copy of what you wanted. A listing with no tags at all is refused when you try to save it, because there would be nothing to compare it by — and reporting it as one of a kind would be nonsense.