It's easy to conflate popularity metrics — views, favorites, even raw sales count — with actual profitability, but these are genuinely different numbers, and a design that looks like a star by views can quietly be a mediocre earner once you account for what it actually costs to produce and sell.
The clearest gap shows up between products with different base costs. A design that sells well as a $15 sticker and a design that sells moderately as a $45 hoodie can generate similar view counts and similar sale counts, while producing very different actual profit — sticker margins are often thinner in raw dollar terms even if the percentage margin looks fine, while a hoodie's higher price point means even a modest number of sales can outearn a much more "popular" but lower-priced product.
Building even a simple tracking habit pays off here — a basic spreadsheet with columns for design name, product type, units sold in a given period, price, and your actual known margin (base cost plus fees, subtracted from price) turns a vague sense of "this one's popular" into an actual number you can compare across your whole catalog.
This becomes especially useful when deciding where to invest further effort — turning a design into more product variants, running an ad budget behind it, or prioritizing it in a seasonal push. A design that's genuinely your top earner by actual profit, even if it's not your most-viewed listing, deserves more of that kind of investment than a high-view, thin-margin design that just looks impressive on a surface-level stats page.
It's also worth periodically checking for the reverse pattern — a design with modest views but a surprisingly strong margin and conversion rate might be under-marketed relative to how well it's actually quietly performing, making it a good candidate for more visibility (a social post, an ad test) precisely because the underlying economics are already proven, even if the raw attention numbers don't reflect that yet.