There’s an economic theory called the Lipstick Indicator — in brief terms, this is a trend observed in times of economic downturn, coined when retailers noticed women spending money on small luxury items (ie. lipstick) instead of high-end items (cars, new homes, etc). It seemed that people were compensating for lack of “big ticket” items by choosing smaller specialty goods.

Today, we can see this trend reflected in eBay sales. Terapeak has been comparing the trend-lines of middle-to-high-end luxury items, and one of our first instincts was to examine the sales of ladies’ handbags — a market we’ve been following for quite some time. Here’s a category trend taken from the past 365 days:

As you can see, there’s a decline over the past year — about 25% — though it’s by no means a “dead” market.

So then what about smaller items? What sacrifices are these buyers making, if not investing in luxury items? Instead of lipstick, we’ve selected another luxe good — anti-aging products. Check out this trend-line for the “Anti-Aging Products” category:

Pretty striking, don’t you think? It’s just one more example of how a fluid online market is near-impossible to contain, and how being forward-thinking and mindful of the Lipstick Indicator will help any seller find their niche.

Press Release out Today!

For immediate release

March 16, 2009

Victoria, BC, Canada

Terapeak, an eBay Certified Provider, today announced the release of several new features for its eBay Marketplace Research tool. The new features promise to improve upon Terapeak’s already-popular web-based research tool, found at www.terapeak.com. For the past five years, online sellers have trusted Terapeak’s reporting tools to provide them with metrics needed to make decisions around pricing, seasonality, and listing of goods on and off the eBay platform.

Terapeak is integrating eBay’s Fixed Price 30-day listing format into search results, and will now report on every specific item as it sells. This transactional information allows sellers to access detailed sales information about their products and competitors. As well, International sellers will be able to review sales across six sites (US, Canada, UK, France, Germany, and Australia) with one fast report. Terapeak is also introducing Value Track, a time-saving tool that allows subscribers to enter a list of their favorite search terms. Terapeak will provide a weekly reporting page each time the user logs in. Finally, thanks to server technology innovations, the speed of searches has improved to less than a second’s wait per report.

Building on subscribers’ feedback and developments on the eBay platform, Terapeak carefully maintains its relevancy to users. Terapeak CEO, Fred Speckeen, explains the growth of the product: “We’re extremely lucky, because we do everything — from support to coding — in house. This means that a comment from a subscriber can literally become a new feature within days, and it means that the dialogue between our users and our team is frequent and interactive. In a rapidly evolving field such as ecommerce, and especially eBay, keeping close to the needs of your customers and the changes within the industry is imperative.”

Terapeak will be rolling out more improvements and features in the coming months. Watch for simple solutions to arbitrage goods internationally, new search filters, and more site improvements!

We’re pleased to announce a new feature to the site - upon log in you’ll notice an occasional TeraTip! TeraTips are short snippets of information on how to use the different tools in Terapeak.

We’ll release new tips all the time, and hope that these will help you to not only learn more about Terapeak, but find new cool ways to improve your business! They’re quick and easy to read, and get you on your way to researching more efficiently!

ZOIKS! Also, our sincere apology to anyone we emailed when turning on our new system. We’ve launched a lovely new mailing program that sent a few subscribers a “test retention” email. The email was just from us, and it shouldn’t happen again! Just delete and accept it as an unexpected “high five” from us to you.

We are always listening to customer feedback and we’ve heard some requests for more advanced keyword search options. We’ve recently added a bunch of wild card search options and OR search options. A full list of our supported search filters is as follows.

I am Andrew E.R. Sukow, CTO at Terapeak.com.  This is a quick note to let everyone know some of the great additions coming to Terapeak shortly.  We have been listening to everyone’s feedback and comments.  We will be adding some new functionality and improvements to Terapeak shortly and will continue to improve Terapeak based on your feedback.  Here is a quick list of items that are launching in the next two weeks.

New Research:

- Average Shipping Price:  We will be moving “Start Price” down lower and will be replacing it with “Avg. Shipping.”  We have heard from our members and agree that knowing the shipping price is valuable.  We worked hard to overcome some technical hurdles but will be adding this data very soon.

- Improved Keyword Data: Currently our keyword research can be sparse or missing in certain circumstances.  This is a trade-off we made years ago in an effort to improve search speed.  We’re proud to say though that with some of our recent hardware purchases we can now boost our keyword research to analyze every single keyword in the result.  The keyword section will show rich information for any search term or any seller once this is launched.

- Faster Searches: Search speed will become 2x as fast in the coming weeks.  We have put in significant work on our database software and we have purchased cutting edge hardware to boost our search speeds.  

- Video Tutorials (with sound): Many people have requested sound to be added to the videos so we are updating our videos with sound video by video and hope to have them fully updated and vastly improved.  A sound icon is next to the videos that have sound.  These are available now online.

We appreciate everyone’s feedback and invite you to continue to provide feature requests, bug reports, and any type of comment.  Please send us your comments.

Sincerely, 

Andrew E.R. Sukow

CTO, Co-Founder

Terapeak.com

Please note - due to a delay in the transfer of data from eBay the date of information will not be updated until August 22. We apologize for any inconvenience, but unfortunately the transfer of data from the source is beyond our control. We will work with eBay to ensure this sort of delay does not happen again.

Best Regards,

The Terapeak Team

… Duh.

While cooking up our latest index-widget value meal, no one was surprised to find Batman mopping the floor with his crime-fighting allies. In not even four full weeks, summer blockbuster The Dark Knight has grossed $440 million domestically, and looks destined to give Titanic a run for highest-earner ever. Over the past 30 days, that’s led to 140,000-plus eBay sells for Gotham’s finest — incredibly, more than Superman and Spider-man combined.

With Terapeak’s new superheroes index, you can compare the total listings, total sales, and average selling price of eBay’s top-10-selling superheroes, from Iron Man to Spawn to Captain America. Running near-last in all categories is Green Lantern, but with a Warner Bros. film in the can for 2010, he’s one to keep an eye on. Finally, we apologize to fans of X-Men’s Wolverine, who was sadly omitted; he’s a top-seller, trust us, but the data’s just too skewed by the maize and blue of Michigan supporters, those weasels. (We mean that technically, weasels… wolverines… Mustelidae family…)

Click here to view the full index, and click here for a widget that embeds easily into any blog (also found on the main index page).

Nah, relax, it’s nothing violent - Lion and Tiger still get along fine - we’re talking about Terapeak’s new Webkinz index, which compares the sales of critters across the eBay ‘kinzdom, from Cow to Gecko to Koala. The free-for-all consists of three separate events, with fun ways to sort and access info about all your favorite contestants. And, like our past indexes, it comes with an embeddable widget that fits easily into any blog.

Upgrades to Terapeak Hardware

We want Terapeak to be the best and most efficient service that it can be, so your searches are completed faster, with the greatest accuracy and minimal load time. In order to keep up with the growth of our client base, and to maintain the corporate philosophy of providing the highest quality service to our users, Terapeak is in growth mode! Our servers are being updated, some replaced, and expanded with the latest technology available to us.

During the transition, with all the heavy lifting and changes happening in our server rooms, there is the potential that the site will experience a few growing pains – by this we mean small outages of a minute or so whilst changes are made to the existing infrastructure. If you run into a small pause in your service, or your search seems slower than normal, please wait a moment (have a nice stretch, it’s good for your back) and try again.

If you continue to experience problems, it may not be an issue with the upgrades, so please go ahead and contact our support department at support@terapeak.com and they’ll help troubleshoot.

We appreciate your patience as we work to improve the services you are subscribed to.

Thank you for your continued support of Terapeak Marketplace Research!

CNN’s first July poll shows Obama up by six percent, but Terapeak’s new McCain-Obama index tells a whole other story. Not only does the index track and compare candidate-related sales and trends, its embeddable widget companion can be easily added to anyone’s blog to share near-real-time data instantly. And, it’s so interactive (and fun and colorful), even John King would be proud!

As the candidates scavenge America for votes this summer, each creates a new market for button-makers and book dealers — but that doesn’t mean the profits are balanced, or even close at all. At the time of writing, McCain-related items had sold 513 times in the last 30 days, for an average price of $8.66; Obama-related sells totaled 10,808, at an average of $19.69 apiece. So who’s controlling the market? Well, for one, the folks making those “Change” tee-shirts.

Put that one up on your big board, Johnny!

Stay ahead yourself in the race to gain from the millions these two spend every day: visit Terapeak now to view the entire index, and click the “i” in the top-right-hand corner to grab your own embeddable widget.