"Well-done Sir Zafar": a Pakistani Etsy instructor turned his students into 5,000 extension users

In late 2026 August, a Pakistani instructor who teaches people to open Etsy shops published his self-made Chrome extension, RankKW, to the store. Two months later it had 5,000 users and 497 ratings, all 5.0 stars. None of its features are new: EverBee, eRank and Alura already had them. It grew because the author already had a classroom full of students. Below is how these users were acquired, how the money is collected, and why most people who follow this path fail.

"Rankkw is Perfect Working. Well-done Sir Zafar"

On Oct 31, a user named Shahid Mehmood left the review above for RankKW in the Chrome store. Five days earlier, another user, Ami N, wrote "Rankkw is an amazing tool. Welldone Sir Zafar". On Oct 30, Muhammad Abubakr wrote "rankkw is superb i got my sale using this software". On Oct 29, Muhammad Haris wrote a long review praising "professional, work quality, timely support... recommended to anyone looking for reliable SEO service". It reads like a review of an agency, not a plugin.

These are one-line five-star reviews, nearly all signed with Pakistani names, and two of them address "Sir Zafar" directly (Chrome store review page, 11-06). Users don't address an unknown developer this way. Students address their teacher this way.

Sir Zafar is Zafar Ali, who lives in Bahawalpur, Punjab, Pakistan, the same address the developer registered in the store. He teaches on iSkills, a Pakistani online skills platform. His instructor page says he has "over nine years of SEO and Etsy experience, founder of RankKW, and has trained thousands of students".

What it is

An Etsy seller research extension. It overlays data on Etsy search results and product pages: how many units a listing has likely sold, for how much, how long it has been listed, and which tags it uses. For a keyword, it shows search volume, competition, and how hard it is to rank. The extension is only the entry point; you need a free account on rankkw.com to use it. The website holds the full toolset: keyword research, competitor shop tracking, tag generation, AI-written titles and descriptions, plus Auto Pilot for creating new listings and Rank Lift for updating existing ones.

Put simply, it's a cheaper EverBee.

Numbers: 5,000 users, with a ratings rate more than 25 times that of peers

Chrome Web Store, 11-06. Similar extensions usually get one rating per one or two hundred users. RankKW gets one per ten.

This ratio has almost only one explanation: someone told people in class or group chats to install it and leave five stars. No direct instruction was found, but the review content is very consistent. The effect is direct: five stars and close to 500 reviews, so when it appears next to EverBee and Alura under "related extensions", it doesn't look new at all.

But it has stalled. From Nov 1 to 6, the user count stayed at 5,000, and the rating only went from 495 to 497.

Where the users came from: the classroom, Facebook, TikTok

Classroom. Zafar Ali sells an Etsy course called iEtsy Pro on iSkills. Its outline includes "AI tools for Etsy business", "writing 13 tags", and "competitor analysis", which map directly onto RankKW's features. On YouTube there is iSkills' "Etsy Business Masterclass 2026", and on Instagram you can see his offline Etsy dropshipping classes in Bahawalpur. When a teacher demos his own tool in class and students already have to do keyword research, installing it is the natural next step.

The founder's own social media. On the third day after listing, on Aug 30 afternoon, he posted on Facebook in romanized Urdu: "RankKW Chrome Extension is Live! Etsy research ab aur bhi easy!" (Etsy research is now even easier). Below it he listed five features, ending with "Install RankKW for FREE from Chrome Web Store". His TikTok @zafaralisee has 12,802 followers and 591 videos, with "Founder rankkw.com" in the bio (11-06). His YouTube has 2,260 subscribers.

Local e-commerce groups. Posts like "Rankkw Etsy SEO tool review" can be found in Pakistani Facebook e-commerce groups.

Almost absent in the English-speaking world. X, Reddit, Hacker News and tech media return no results. The only external trace comes from competitors: on Oct 15, Alura published a dedicated "Alura vs RankKW" page, concluding that RankKW is the choice for the cheapest keyword research. But RankKW uses Google search volume, not Etsy on-site data, and it only connects to shops read-only, so AI-written copy has to be pasted back manually. The leaders are watching it, which shows this approach threatens them.

Money: from $0.99, rupees accepted too

The extension is free; money is collected on the website (rankkw.com/pricing, 11-06):

What really sets it apart is at the top of the page: "Card payment not working? Pay in Pakistani rupees, from Rs 270 / month, no bank card needed." Payment is by Allied Bank transfer or JazzCash wallet. After paying, you upload a screenshot, and access is activated manually within 24 hours. EverBee and Alura only take US-dollar credit cards, and Alura's cheapest paid tier is $11.99. Many Pakistani Etsy beginners have no card that can pay a dollar subscription, and this matters more than any feature.

Paid user numbers and revenue are not public, so there is no way to see them from outside.

Who it's competing with

The Chrome store is already crowded with Etsy research extensions: EverBee (200k users, from $2021 a year), Alura (100k), EHunt (100k), eRank (40k), and below them ESale, Toolsy, ProfitTree and Sale Samurai, each with between one and twenty thousand users. Etsy's own seller dashboard also provides official search data.

The most telling entrant is SBMM – SEO Signals & Etsy Toolkit, listed on Oct 5, five weeks after RankKW. It already has 7,000 users and a 4.9-star rating from 61 reviews. Its website sbmm.com.pk belongs to another Pakistani SEO and digital marketing training provider, and the playbook is identical. "A training company ships a tool on the side" is no longer a one-off in Pakistan.

If it were you

C: worth learning from, not worth copying as is. Anyone can build RankKW's product, but its users are students and followers that Zafar Ali built over nine years, and a follower can't get them. This path also has a ceiling set by how many students the instructor has, and after 5,000 users it stalls too.

Who it fits: people who already have a group of students or followers, who teach shop setup, product selection or ad buying on a particular platform, who repeat the same manual method in class, and whose students' countries make dollar subscriptions hard (Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nigeria, Egypt, Vietnam and similar). Who it doesn't fit: those without a stage or followers, who hope to take users from EverBee and Alura with a slightly better Etsy keyword extension. The features are already standard, every page of the store is full of similar tools, and you can't catch up on stars or review counts.

How to do it: turn the steps you teach in class into a tool as they are. Every button should correspond to a step you cover in class. Keep the extension free and charge for the website. Push the entry price down to about one dollar, and offer local wallets and bank transfer with a rough but effective "upload a screenshot, manually activated" flow. Don't limit yourself to Etsy; the same approach can move to TikTok Shop, Shopee, Amazon or Fiverr classes.

How to get users: post on day one in your classes, student groups, and your own Facebook and TikTok. Write in your students' native language, as Zafar Ali did. Ask students to leave real feedback after installing, not a scripted "Well-done Sir". The Chrome Web Store has rules against soliciting incentivized reviews, and bulk review removal is the most realistic risk on this path.

When to act: there is no rush. This only works if you already have your own students; no window is needed. The real thing to race is whether your platform and country still lack an instructor doing this. Pakistan's Etsy scene already has two.

Signs you've read this wrong: (1) RankKW or SBMM passes 10k users in the next month or two, and new reviews stop being one-line student five-stars. That would mean they've moved beyond the student circle and strangers accept the product itself. At that point, "a cheap local-payment tool in another country" moves from C to a bet worth making. (2) The reverse: if the Chrome store bulk-deletes its reviews, or the user count starts falling, this approach has a shorter shelf life than expected.