How it finds them
Two filters, both Etsy’s own, and one call per place per day.
The two filters
| Filter | What Etsy does with it |
|---|---|
shop_location | Filters by where the shop is. Etsy parses the text itself and answers with an error if it cannot read it. Whatever you type goes across verbatim. |
buyer_country | Optional. Filters to listings that will actually post to that country. Someone two streets away who does not ship to you is not local in any sense that matters. |
Nothing here guesses at geography. There is no map, no radius, no coordinates and no distance calculation, and you are never asked where you are. The word you type is the whole of it. That means “Bristol” and “Bristol, UK” may return different things, and the honest answer to which is better is: try both.
When a place will not parse
If Etsy cannot read the location, this app says so. It does not fall back to a search with no location, which would return the whole marketplace and present two hundred strangers as local makers.
A new place is checked against Etsy before it is saved, so a typo is refused at the form. If a place stops working later, you are told once, with a suggestion — the town on its own, or the county, or the country.
The unit is a maker, not a listing
Etsy ranks a search by relevance across the whole marketplace, which buries small local shops under large ones wherever they are. The point of pinning to a place is to find out that somebody exists.
So several listings from one shop count as one maker, each maker appears once with a single example of their work, and the name links to their shop on Etsy where the rest of it is. A ninth mug from a shop you already know is not news; a workshop that opened up the road is.
How small the field is, stated outright
Under twelve makers, the page says that is all of them rather than implying there is more below the fold. Buying local means a handful of names, and pretending otherwise is the sort of thing that makes people give up on it.
When a place is first added, the same search is run once without the location, so the page can tell you what pinning it actually did — “Bristol narrows 24,800 results down to these”. That measurement is made once and never repeated: doing it daily would double every request to tell you something you were told on day one.
When it writes to you
When a maker turns up that you have not been shown before, and once when a place stops returning anything or stops parsing. Not otherwise. A small place produces a few names and then nothing for weeks — silence is the accurate report, not a failure.
Every shop the search returns is recorded as seen, not just the ones named in an email, so a maker who appeared while your mail was switched off is not announced as new weeks later.
What was wrong with the older version
The single-user version of this app carried a comment in its source saying Etsy did not expose seller location in listing search, and filtered on shop names instead — while telling people it found makers in a place. Measured against Etsy’s published API specification, that was simply not true. This version does the real thing, and the wrong comment is quoted in the source here rather than quietly deleted.