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As promised, here are a couple photos from big events we’ve blogged about recently!
The first is a shot of Terapeak founders Anthony and Andrew Sukow at the G8 Young Business Summit in Stresa, Italy:
Lookin’ good, guys!
And the second is a shot of our various international teams standing in front of Victoria’s Inner Harbor, taken during the Terapeak International Conference:
AuctionBytes, an online publication that reports on ecommerce and eBay, yesterday published a terrific article titled “Terapeak Quantifies the Michael Jackson Effect on eBay”. Chock full of eye-popping sales figures taken before and after the performer’s death, the article does a great job illustrating the impact of Jackson’s death across the entire eBay platform.
It also reiterates a pattern we’ve been seeing for years — that global-scale events are almost always a sure bet to shift the market.
Today, as thousands gather in Los Angeles (as well as many other places around the world) to remember the King of Pop, we’ve played around with our most recent data set and found a few more remarkable figures. Consider the following:
Those final average price figures are even more remarkable when you consider that, prior to Jackson’s death, expensive concert tickets would have been inflating that $22.70!
Finally, we’ll leave you with a couple Terapeak screen shots that we think are pretty telling. First, here’s the past 30 days’ eBay.com listings for “Michael Jackson”:
And here’s the top of Terapeak’s Hot 100 Music section (trust us, he’s got a whole bunch more on there):
If hosting our international partners wasn’t worldly enough for you, we’re excited to announce that brothers Anthony and Andrew Sukow, founders of Terapeak and Advanced Ecommerce Research Systems, are currently en route to Stresa, Italy to participate in the 2009 G8 Summit.
Anthony, Terapeak’s Executive Vice President of Business Development, and Andrew, Chief Technology Officer, are representing the Canadian Youth Business Foundation as Entrepreneur Delegates, and will both be on hand to discuss the birth and growth of AERS/Terapeak — from becoming eBay’s first official data licensor all the way back in 2004, to taking over eBay’s own retired Marketplace Research tool last fall.
On behalf of everyone at the Terapeak offices (even those of us who’d rather be in Italy ourselves!), it is an honor to be recruited for an event as big as this, on a stage as international as any in the world.
In related “speaking” news, Anthony was also a featured speaker at the 2009 eBay Developers Conference in San Jose, California two weeks ago, where he delivered a speech on the benefits of Data-Powered Selling Manager Applications. The DevCon is widely attended and regarded within the industry as a hotbed for up-and-coming developers, entrepreneurs, and anyone else interested in the future of eBay and online commerce.
Here’s a shot of Anthony doing his thing on the DevCon stage:
If we’re using the word “excited” a lot, please forgive us; we just couldn’t be more thrilled about Terapeak’s continued involvement in not only the mainstream eBay community, but with regards to online business worldwide!
Just another reminder that if you haven’t already signed up to receive Terapeak’s monthly newsletter, you can click the link below to receive news and updates from our team at the beginning of every month. The next edition will go out Wednesday, July 1st, and we always love to grow our readership.
Thanks!
We’re pleased to announce that Terapeak’s first International Conference, which took place June 22-24 right here at Terapeak HQ in Victoria, was a major success.
The partners gathered for three days of intensive, productive meetings to discuss new and better ways of providing eBay marketplace research, as well as fine-tuning and streamlining the relationships between all Terapeak brands. Here at the company, we’ve always understood the need for a global perspective, and we feel particularly enlightened having shared all kinds of world views with our friends and business partners. As you can probably imagine, the markets in China and Germany, for example, are quite a bit different from our own in North America!
Of course, we wouldn’t have been good hosts if we hadn’t left time for some fun and team-building, and so a lot of great food was consumed, the lush west coast terrain explored — and hey, we even saw a few whales! (Actually closer to 50 if you can believe it.)
We’re excited now to move forward with this better understanding, to further refine these partnerships, and to provide you with the best Terapeak possible!
We’ll also try to post some pictures from the conference as soon as we find that camera…
Over the nearly seven years since Terapeak was first created, we’ve always been extremely proud to see growth in the product and its reach. Of course that doesn’t mean we’re ever satisfied, or that we aren’t always looking at better ways to serve our customers — but we do enjoy standing back every now and then and high-fiving about where we’re at.
Next Monday, we’ll be welcoming some of our international partners to Terapeak.com headquarters, and sitting down to discuss all kinds of ways to improve both the product and company. As you may or may not know, Terapeak has partner sites in China, France, and Germany, and in the same way it applies to many things in life (including selling on eBay, as we’ve told you about recently), we believe in striving for a truly global perspective. Hosting our international partners is a momentous occasion for us, and something we couldn’t be more excited about.
We hope to take a lot from these meetings, and to eventually share it with you! Of course, as always, we think it’s absolutely vital to also keep an open discussion with our client base, so feel free to share any comments or questions you may have yourself.
Cheers, all!
(Terapeak.de team in Germany: Karsten, Julia, Denise)
If you’re a long-time Terapeak subscriber and/or blog reader, you’ll know we’ve had a keen interest in iPhones since the first 3G models were released last summer. It wasn’t hard to predict then that the device would become an instant eBay superstar, and so the Terapeak iPhone index became the very first in our collection of Terapeak indexes.
Fast forward to a week ago yesterday, when Apple dropped the price of its entry-level iPhone to $99 USD, and many began wondering how in-store price cuts would affect eBay sales. Well, as you can see below, the immediate reaction has been anything but slow:
The above image, of course, was captured using the Terapeak iPhone index, which we’ll surely be following in the coming weeks, and shows an incredible spike in both 3G and Locked iPhone total sales. You can also track iPhone (and Blackberry) sales using the index’s companion widget, as seen below:
And one last point of interest, as mentioned in the previously-linked-to Metro article: Apple has also unveiled its 3GS iPhone — a supposedly faster, more expensive model that records video — and will begin selling those later this month.
Suffice to say, Apple and the iPhone folks aren’t dropping off the eBay radar anytime soon!
(Worst headline ever? Yeah, probably. Okay, moving on…)
It’s officially wedding season here in the northern hemisphere, and, as with every year, that means millions of dollars pouring through a plethora of wedding-related industries: everything from formal wear to fancy cakes, manicures to mannequins, dancing shoes to Dom Perignon, and obviously so much more.
But what about 2009 in particular? What about in – dun-dun-dun! — today’s economy?
Browsing some of the wedding-related categories on Terapeak, we were somewhat surprised by the patterns we found — namely the fact that many of these categories appear to be trending up. Of course, it’s not as if we expected engaged parties to suddenly close the checkbook on perhaps the most important day of their lives… but why is it that these folks are turning to eBay for their big-day needs? Could it be that, in fact, they are saving a few bucks by doing their shopping and prep-work online? In any case, sellers tied to any of the following categories can’t be complaining…
Check out this two-year Total Sales trend for Wedding Invitations:
And this two-year Total Sales trend for Bridal Accessories:
And one more, this two-year Total Sold Listings trend for Engagement/Wedding Ring Sets:
As for the wedding industry as a whole, we can’t stress enough how truly expansive it is. Try doing a Terapeak category search for “wedding” and see how many relevant results come up. Believe us, there’s a ton — and those are only the obvious ones! If you can get creative and tailor other categories to suit wedding needs, you’ll be reaping the rewards all summer long.
Looking at Terapeak’s Hot Media for April-May, the top five DVDs display a pretty wide breadth of film styles; you’ve got a near-three-hour Academy darling, a slapstick comedy starring that dude from King of Queens, two classic Disney favorites… and, of course, Twilight.
So obviously, if you’re in the popular DVD biz, these titles are among your bread-winners. But what about other merchandising opportunities? This blog will take a look at memorabilia and paraphernelia related to these films, and examples of ways to make the most of Terapeak’s Hot Research.
As you can see — and it’s no surprise, really — first on our list is Twilight, the initial film adaptation of Stephanie Meyer’s best-selling vampire series (which we blogged about fairly recently). A 30-day All Sites search for “Twilight” uncovers more than 78,000 results, and with such an obsessed worldwide following, you can bet anything Twilight-related has a good chance of sparking interest. Beyond DVDs, here are its next five most popular Level-2 categories:
Next is The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, David Fincher’s adaptation of a 1922 F. Scott Fitzgerald story. The film, starring Brad Pitt, led the 2009 Academy Awards with 13 nominations, but that hasn’t exactly translated into merchandising opportunities. (Perhaps viewers who sat through its 165 minutes felt they’d had enough?)
A 30-day All Sites search for “Benjamin Button” results in 2,832 listings, with the most popular related Level-2 categories being the following:
Placing third is Paul Blart: Mall Cop, a Kevin James comedy that reached #1 in North American box offices. We weren’t sure what to expect in terms of non-DVD merchandise… and a 30-day search for “Paul Blart” turned up barely 2,000 listings. In fact, here are all the non-DVD Level-2 categories that turned up 10+ results:
Seriously, that’s it.
Finally, rounding out the top five are two classic Disney films, remastered and re-released: Beauty and the Beast and Lion King. These old faves require no introduction, and both (like most things Disney-related) have been merchandising gold mines for many, many years. Here are the top non-DVD categories for both, beginning with a 30-day All Sites search for “Beauty and the Beast”:
And “Lion King”:
If you’re a Hot Research subscriber, check out some of the other top titles… The examples shown above are barely the opening credits!
It’s been close to two months since we blogged about the NHL or mentioned the Terapeak NHL index (blame the sad-sack Canucks, who failed us once again), but watching the Pittsburgh Penguins salvage their season last night with a win over the Detroit Red Wings reinvigorated us.
This morning, a quick look at the index (its companion widget can be seen below) shows some pretty interesting stats: namely, that the Total Sold Listings leaders in the Eastern and Western Conferences are, respectively, Pittsburgh and Detroit.
Of course we’ve been championing both clubs as top-sellers all season, but it’s funny to see after eight gruelling months and 100+ games played for each side, that the hottest eBay seller in each conference is represented in the Cup Finals as well. (An obvious contributing factor is the success and talent on both squads, plus the fact that both are still playing hockey well into June…)
As for how the rest of the finals will play out, here at Terapeak we’d like to see a good, long series… Because then that’s it for hockey until — gasp — October!
