How Everlyst scores listing health (the actual math)
· 3 min read
Most tools give your listings a mystery grade and expect you to trust it. Here is exactly how Everlyst scores listing health, why every score is relative to your own shop, and what the categories actually mean.
Plenty of Etsy tools will grade your listings. Very few will tell you how. You get a number, or a letter, or a color, and you are expected to reorganize your work week around it without knowing what it measures.
We think that is backwards. If a score is going to direct where you spend your time, you should be able to see the math. So here it is.
Scored against your shop, not the world
The first decision, and the most important one: every listing in Listing Health is scored against the rest of your own active catalog, not against a global benchmark.
A global benchmark sounds authoritative and means almost nothing. A jewelry listing and a furniture listing have wildly different natural view counts, price points, and purchase rhythms. Comparing your listing to “all Etsy listings” or even “listings in your category” produces a number nobody can act on.
Comparing it to your own catalog answers the question you actually have: of the listings I run, which pull their weight and which drag? That question has a usable answer, because everything being compared shares your shop, your niche, your traffic, and your photography.
Concretely, each listing gets a percentile rank within your shop on each signal. A sales percentile of 80 means the listing outsells 80% of your catalog. Not the platform. Yours.
The weights
Four signals combine into the overall score:
Sales carry 40%. Revenue is the point of the shop, so it gets the largest share. This is computed from your real imported transaction history, not estimated.
Views carry 25%. Views measure whether Etsy search and browsing surface the listing at all. A listing with sales but weak views is converting well on thin traffic; a listing with views but no sales has a conversion problem. The gap between these two signals is often the diagnosis.
Fees carry 20%. This uses charges actually observed in your Etsy payment ledger. A listing that generates fees out of proportion to its revenue is quietly worse than it looks.
Favorites carry 15%. Favorites are interest without commitment. Alone they mean little, which is why the weight is smallest, but a listing with high favorites and low sales is a specific, recognizable situation: buyers want it and something at the decision point turns them away. Usually price or shipping.
The categories
Percentiles rank, but ranking alone does not tell you what to do. Categories translate the numbers into situations:
Dead Stock: active, no sales in 90 or more days. The market has answered. See it in depth in the Dead Stock view.
Declining: sales have dropped by half or more against the prior period. Something changed, and catching it early is worth more than any other alert on the page.
High Potential: favorites well above the shop norm, sales below it. The interest exists. Review the price and shipping cost before touching anything else.
Top Performers: the top of the shop by revenue. These are on the page so you protect them, watch inventory, watch the fee ratio, and think carefully before changing what works.
Everything else is Healthy, and healthy listings need nothing from you today.
Deterministic on purpose
Every suggestion in Listing Health is a template driven by the data. The same situation always produces the same advice. There is no AI generating plausible-sounding guidance, no model with an opinion that changes between refreshes.
We built it this way deliberately. Advice that directs real work on a real shop should be traceable to the numbers that produced it, and you should be able to check that trace yourself. When the page says sales fell from twelve units to four over two quarters, those are your transactions, counted.
What it feeds into
A score is only useful if fixing things is cheap. The table sorts worst-first by default, so the session starts at the listings that need you. From there, edits flow into Bulk Edit or Advanced Edit with the same preview-before-apply workflow as everything else in Everlyst, and performance data pairs with Issue Detection, which covers the quality side: tags, photos, titles, and the other fixable fields.
Listing Health is included on every paid plan, built on the same one-time import as Sales Analytics. Basic covers 90 days of history; Starter and Pro import up to 5 years.