The twelve-month window

Etsy's own documentation defines the two numbers this whole site is built on:

That phrase is the product. Your shop's rating is not a lifetime average — it is a rolling twelve-month one. Which means it changes for two different reasons.

Reason one: a review arrives

Etsy already emails you about this, so revu only writes when the arrival is one you would want to answer today: three stars or fewer. A run of five-star reviews is lovely and does not need a second email from us saying so.

Reason two: a review turns a year old

On its first anniversary a review stops counting. Nothing announces this. There is no event, no notification, no line in any dashboard — the number simply is different one morning.

A single 2-star review among forty is worth about 0.07 of your average. The day it ages out, you go from 4.72 to 4.79, and on the shop page a shopper stops seeing 4.7 and starts seeing 4.8. Nobody did anything. It was on the calendar the whole time.

That is the date revu tells you. It reads the reviews inside your window, finds the next one due to leave it, works out what your figure becomes when it does, and says so — before it happens rather than after.

What runs, and when

• Once a day we read the two figures Etsy publishes for your shop, and keep the previous pair so we can tell you what moved.
• Once a day we ask for reviews created since we last looked. Etsy filters that on its side, so it is one request whether your shop has four reviews or four hundred.
• About once a week — and always straight after a departure lands — we read the whole window to work out which review leaves next.

Two ways to reach the next mark

Every panel shows how many more five-star reviews would put you above the next mark, and the date the next review ages out. Those are two genuinely different routes to the same number, and one of them costs you nothing but patience. Knowing which is closer is the point.