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Version 2026-10. This page covers these fields: A shop’s sales.lifetime is not an estimate: it is Etsy’s own count of the shop’s sales.

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The idea: reviews follow sales

Etsy shows how many sales a shop has made in total, and how many reviews each listing has. Buyers in a given shop review a fairly steady share of their orders, so a shop’s reviews divided by its sales gives its review rate, and a listing’s reviews divided by that rate give its sales.

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Products

  • Lifetime sales (est_lifetime): the product’s reviews divided by its shop’s review rate. It is never less than twice the product’s review count, and never more than the shop’s total sales. A product with no reviews gets a small estimate from how often it is viewed, at most 20 sales.
  • Monthly average (est_monthly_avg): lifetime sales divided by the number of 30-day months since the product was listed. A product listed less than a month ago uses its lifetime sales. This is an average over the product’s whole life, so a product that sold well years ago keeps a high average. For recent sales, use est_last_month.
  • Monthly history (est_sales in sales history, and est_last_month): each month’s reviews of the product divided by the shop’s review rate. Reviews count in the month they were written, which is usually a few weeks after the order. A month with no reviews is an estimate of 0 sales.

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Shops

  • Monthly average (est_monthly_avg): Etsy’s count of the shop’s sales divided by the number of 30-day months since it opened.
  • Monthly history and est_last_month: each month’s reviews across all the shop’s listings, divided by the shop’s review rate.

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Revenue

Revenue estimates multiply estimated sales by a price in USD:
  • For a product, the product’s current price, converted to USD at the day’s exchange rate. Revenue is valued at the current price, not the price at the time of each sale, so a product whose price changed shows past months at today’s price. When Alura has no USD price, revenue is null.
  • For a shop, the shop’s current average price: the mean USD price of its listings, leaving out unusually cheap and unusually expensive ones. A shop’s est_lifetime_revenue_usd is different: it adds each period’s new sales at the average price of that time, so it is not at today’s price. est_monthly_avg_revenue_usd divides it by the months since the shop opened.
Revenue estimates leave out discounts, shipping, taxes and Etsy’s fees.

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How accurate it is

We compared the monthly estimates with real orders from 6 connected shops (shops whose owners connected them to Alura), January to September 2026, measured on 2026-10-13: in aggregate the estimates were within 5% of real sales, and they moved in the right direction in 27 of the 34 months compared. Six shops is a small sample. Read it as a check that the method works on average, not as the accuracy you can expect for any one product or shop. Estimates for a single product with few reviews can be far off.

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Known limits

  • Recent months fill in late. Reviews arrive weeks after orders, so the last month or two start low and rise as reviews come in. History responses carry methodology_version because past values can change this way.
  • Products with few reviews have rough estimates: one review more or less changes them a lot.
  • One review rate per shop. A listing whose buyers review more or less often than the rest of the shop gets an estimate that is too low or too high.
  • Unknown is null. When Alura lacks the reviews, the history or a price, the estimate is null, never 0.

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