How to Analyse a Competitor's Etsy Shop (and What the Data Won't Tell You)

Researching what your competitors are selling isn’t cheating. It’s smart business. Every experienced Etsy seller does it: checking out what’s performing well in their niche, what keywords are working, what price points are landing.

But there’s a gap in how most makers do competitor research. And if you fall into it, you can end up working harder and making less money.

The gap is this: revenue estimates tell you what’s selling, but they say nothing about what it costs to make.

What Etsy Competitor Analytics Tools Actually Show You

Tools like Everbee, EverBee Analytics, and Koalanda have become genuinely useful for Etsy sellers. What they do well:

• Estimated monthly revenue for a shop or specific listing
• Bestseller identification (which products are generating most orders)
• Keyword strategies: what search terms competitors are ranking for
• Listing age, review velocity, and conversion estimates

These are real signals. If you’re trying to decide which product category to enter, or figuring out what price point the market will accept, these tools give you a useful starting point.

Here’s what they can’t show you: cost structure, material margins, or whether any of that revenue is actually turning into profit.

A shop doing an estimated $12,000/month in revenue might be clearing $4,000 after materials, packaging, and labour. Or they might be running at break-even because their candle vessels cost $3.80 each and they priced the candle at $18. You can’t tell from the outside.

The Data Gap: Revenue Estimates vs. Profit Reality

This is where a lot of Etsy sellers get into trouble. They see a competitor doing strong numbers on a product. They think: “That looks like it’s working. I should make that too.”

So they set up a similar listing. Match the price point. The orders start coming in.

And then, three months later, they realise they’re barely covering costs. Sometimes they’re actually losing money.

The reason is almost always the same. They benchmarked against someone else’s revenue without knowing that seller’s cost structure. Their own costs (higher-quality materials, different batch sizes, slower production pace, or geographic differences in supplier pricing) simply don’t match.

Revenue is visible from the outside. Profit is private.

Here’s the honest math. Two candle makers can both be selling a 200ml soy candle for $22. One is using bulk soy wax at $0.80/kg, a vessel she buys 500 at a time for $1.20 each, a wick for $0.08, and a basic fragrance oil at 6% load. Her cost per candle might be around $3.50, a margin she’s happy with.

The other maker is buying from a local supplier at smaller minimums, paying more per litre for fragrance because she uses premium blends at 9% load, and her vessel is a heavier glass jar at $2.40 each. Her cost per candle might be closer to $7. At $22, the margin is thin. And if she’s not tracking her numbers carefully, she might not realise it for months.

Same price. Same product on paper. Very different economics underneath.

Why Copying a Bestseller Can Lose You Money

This is the specific scenario that the revenue-only approach misses.

You spot a bestselling product. The shop has strong reviews, regular sales, an appealing listing. You think: if they can sell that, I can sell that. So you reverse-engineer the product, set a similar price, and launch.

What you don’t know:

1. Their supplier relationship. That seller might have been ordering from the same supplier for four years and negotiated pricing at volume that you won’t see until year three.

2. Their batch yield. A 500g batch of soap yields different per-bar costs depending on whether you cut to 90g bars or 110g bars, and whether you track your cure time waste. A maker who’s been optimising their process for two years has better yield than someone just starting out.

3. Their labour rate. Some sellers don’t pay themselves for their time at all, which means their “profitable” price isn’t actually profitable by any reasonable measure. Copying their price means copying their underpayment.

4. Their production volume. Fixed overhead (rent, tools, labels) gets cheaper per unit as volume increases. If they’re making 200 units a month and you’re making 20, your overhead cost per unit is ten times higher.

None of this shows up in a revenue estimate.

The Cost-Side Research Your Competitor Can’t Hide From You

Here’s what’s useful about competitor research that doesn’t require any spy tool.

Their listing tells you a lot:

• Price point — what the market accepts and what customers are paying
• Product description — what features they’re highlighting, what benefits they’re leaning on
• Photos — the presentation standard the market expects
• Review language — what customers actually care about (“smells amazing”, “arrived so fast”, “exactly as described” are all useful signal)
• Shipping options — are they absorbing shipping, bundling it in, or charging separately

This is freely available, no analytics subscription required.

What it doesn’t tell you is what’s behind the product. And that’s where your own research starts.

Before entering any new product category, the question isn’t “what is this selling for?” The question is “what would it cost me to make this, at my volume, with my suppliers, on my timeline?”

That means doing your own cost baseline.

How to Build Your Own Cost Baseline Before Entering a Category

This is the step most makers skip. Don’t skip it.

Step 1: List every material and its cost per unit of use.

Not the purchase price: the cost per unit you actually use in the product. If you buy 1kg of fragrance oil for $28 and use 25g per batch, your cost per batch is $0.70. Work out every material this way. Don’t forget packaging (labels, boxes, tissue paper, stickers) — these are real costs that get overlooked.

For candles, your material list typically includes: wax (per gram), fragrance oil (per gram), wick (per unit), vessel (per unit), label (per unit), box or packaging (per unit). Each one has a cost.

Step 2: Calculate your batch yield.

How many finished units does a single production run produce? A standard batch of cold process soap might yield 10 bars at 90g each. A candle maker pouring 2kg of wax into 200ml vessels gets roughly 9–10 candles per session, depending on pour waste and fragrance load.

Divide your total material cost by batch yield to get your material cost per unit. If your batch costs $31 in materials and yields 10 units, your per-unit material cost is $3.10.

Step 3: Add your time.

This is the step most Etsy sellers skip (and it’s often the one that makes a product unprofitable at competitive prices).

Be honest about how long production takes, end to end. Not just pouring time, but setup, cleanup, cure/dry time monitoring, labelling, photographing, packing. For a candle maker, a production session might take 2–3 hours including all the surrounding tasks. At a modest $20/hour labour rate, that’s $40–$60 in labour across 9–10 candles.

Add that per unit and suddenly the candle that looked like a $3.10 material cost becomes an $8–$10 total cost.

Step 4: Add a slice of your overhead.

If you pay for a website, listing fees, materials storage, packaging supplies you hold in inventory, or any tools that wear out, spread those costs across your monthly production to get a per-unit overhead figure. Even a rough estimate is better than ignoring them entirely.

Step 5: Compare to the market price you researched.

Now you have a real question to answer: at the price point where competitors are selling, is there enough margin for you?

This isn’t about whether competitors are profitable. It’s about whether you are.

If the answer is no (if your true cost is too close to, or above, the competitive price point) you have options. Source materials differently. Increase batch size. Adjust the product slightly to lower the cost. Or choose a different product entirely.

Putting It Together: A Complete Competitive Research Framework for Makers

Here’s how to combine the visibility tools with the cost work:

Phase 1: Market research (what’s selling and at what price)

• Use Everbee or similar to identify bestselling products and price ranges in your target category
• Read reviews across 5–10 top sellers to understand what customers value
• Note shipping approaches, bundle sizes, and listing formats
• Identify any gaps: products that buyers mention wanting but few shops offer

Phase 2: Cost baseline (what it would cost you)

• Price out materials for the product using your actual suppliers
• Calculate batch yield based on your production setup
• Add honest labour at a rate you’d pay yourself
• Include overhead at a rough per-unit level
• Total cost = your floor price (what you need to charge to break even)

Phase 3: Margin check

• Compare floor price to market price range
• Calculate your minimum viable margin (many makers target 3x material cost for retail; for wholesale, 2x)
• If margin works: proceed to test the product
• If margin is thin: investigate supplier alternatives or adjust the product before committing

Phase 4: Decision

• If you can make the product at a margin that works for you, at a price the market accepts: launch
• If not: move on. The competitor doing well at that price may have cost advantages you can’t match right now.

This framework takes maybe a few hours to run for a new product category. That’s hours well spent before you invest in materials, photography, and listing optimisation.

Tracking It All Without a Spreadsheet

If you’ve read this far, you’re probably thinking about how to actually track these numbers consistently — not just as a one-off exercise when evaluating a new product, but as a regular view of your business.

That’s exactly where a tool like Craftybase comes in. You add your materials with their current costs, build recipes for each product, and when you record a manufacture, Craftybase automatically calculates your cost per unit and deducts materials from your inventory.

When material prices change (and they do, regularly) you update the purchase, and Craftybase recalculates your costs across every recipe that uses that material. No spreadsheet hunting. No re-doing the maths.

The result is that at any point, you know your true cost per product. And when you’re evaluating a competitor’s price, you’re comparing it to your actual number, not a guess.

More on that approach in our post on recipe costing software.

For the COGS piece (what you’ll eventually need for tax time and profit tracking) see COGS tracking for Etsy sellers and how to price on Etsy.

Frequently Asked Questions