Using Shop Pulse

Pulse (/etsy/pulse) is the monitoring surface. It watches your listings between visits and tells you when something changed that you would not otherwise notice for weeks.

Where the Etsy dashboard shows how the shop is doing, Pulse shows what has moved.

What it watches

Three things, each with its own section, and all of them are your own shop.

Alerts. Something happened to a specific listing: it stopped being active, its views fell away, its position changed. Each alert names the listing and what it saw.

Refresh queue. Listings due an edit, tagged with why. “Near expiry” means the four month clock is nearly up. “Stagnant” means it has sat unchanged while earning nothing.

Opportunities. Places where a change is likely to help, most often a tag that similar listings in your shop are using and this one is not.

Why there is no competitor tracking

Pulse watches your listings and nothing else. It does not track other shops, and it will not.

Etsy’s API terms are explicit on this. Requesting Etsy content for analytics needs written authorisation from Etsy, with no allowance for doing it a listing at a time, and keeping historical snapshots of another seller’s listings is separately disallowed. Building it would put your shop’s connection at risk, not only ours.

Where market context is genuinely useful, it comes from aggregated signals that identify no shop and no listing. See Using Market Intelligence.

Severity

Three levels, and the difference matters:

A listing selling out arrives as FYI, not critical. It is good news, though it still earns a mention, because a sold-out listing earns nothing further until you restock or renew it.

Dismiss and resolve

Both remove the alert from the list. They mean different things and it is worth using them honestly, because the record is what tells you whether the alerts are any good.

• Resolve means you dealt with it.
• Dismiss means it did not need dealing with.

Neither touches the listing. Dismissing an alert about an expired listing does not renew it, and resolving one does not edit anything. The alert is a message, not a task queue with side effects.

If an action fails, the row says why rather than disappearing. Failures here almost always mean the Etsy connection needs re-authorising.

Coach Mode

Sets how often Pulse checks and how much it says. Change it at the top of the page. Turning the cadence down makes Pulse quieter without turning off the checks.

Refresh

The refresh control re-reads everything. It does not go to Etsy for fresh listing data, which happens once a day on your shop’s own schedule. Pressing refresh a second time will not produce newer numbers.

FAQ

Why do I have no alerts? Either nothing has changed, or the shop has not been connected long enough to have a baseline to compare against. Alerts need history before they can spot a change.

An alert names a listing I deleted. Resolve it. Alerts are recorded against a moment in time and are not withdrawn when the listing goes.

Does dismissing tell it to stop watching? No. It clears that alert. If the same condition recurs, so will the alert.

Can my assistant clear alerts? Yes, if you have shared the workspace with them.

Do alerts cost anything? No. Watching is free. Only creating new products consumes credits.