How the hell do they rank on Etsy?

In my last post I mentioned that I'm sick of Etsy and want to start my own shop. But that does not mean I want to give up, etsy is a good source of money or at least CAN be. So my listings have ranked we are in the top 1% sellers but sales have decreased insanely since 2-3 months.

But those shops that were below us (2 shops) are not having tons of sales! So I analyzed their tags and one of these 2 shops have weird tags with low search volume......... I thought is this a trick? Like where the hell do they get these tags recommendations with like 0 search volume lol and rank first page wit h a lot of bestsellers and many daily sales!

So then I thought okay maybe their traffic simply come from outside source like social media so I did a research and they don't update at all their social media there's not much action on it.

Do you guys have any idea what is this? I see weird things on etsy like top listings having short titles when they could use more to get found, - / instead of , and now this. Using weird keywords but still ranking.

There are many ways in which a competitor's listing can sell better than your listing, even though the SEO of a competitor's listing is several times worse than yours.
As for low-frequency keywords, this is a very common strategy for creating listings. Example: You create 2 listings with the same product, in one listing you write high-frequency keywords (most popular), in the second you use low-frequency keywords. Thus, 1 your listing will be ranked by the most popular keywords, and the second one will be found by buyers who search for this product by low-frequency keywords. It happens that thanks to some low-frequency keyword, sales increase significantly.
There is also a possibility that some blogger could buy a competitor’s product and then advertise it on his social networks, etc.
In general, there are a lot of options to understand the problem - you need to conduct a deep analysis of the product, SEO, listings of competitors, etc.