A Holiday Gift for Terapeak Users: Our new iPhone app!

As a token of our appreciation for each and every Terapeak subscriber, we’re proud this month to not only introduce our brand new iPhone application, but to offer it FREE as part of all North American Terapeak subscriptions!

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The Terapeak iPhone app has been in the works for a long time, and it’s a tool we feel will add a whole new dimension to conducting market research. Now you’ll be able to take Terapeak with you wherever you go — to garage sales, trade shows, thrift stores, and more!

Similar to Terapeak’s web version, the application allows users to see average prices, listing totals and sell-through rates for each search. Results are viewable and sortable by end price, start price and number of bids, and can be filtered by category, minimum end price and maximum end price. All of this data comes neatly packaged and is accessible with only a few clicks, so it’s easy to always keep on top of your game.

To access the application, all you need to do is download it on your iPhone from the Apple store in iTunes*, then enter your Terapeak username and password to get started!

We hope you enjoy it! And happy holidays!

(*Please note: Currently, the Terapeak iPhone app is only available via the American and Canadian iTunes stores. We apologize for any inconvenience.)

(*Please note: Currently, this app is only free to users in North America, Australia, and The United Kingdom who have Advantage Subscriptions. We apologize for any inconvenience)

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Sell antiques and collectibles? Beta testers wanted for new Terapeak Collectibles tool!

If any of you readers are interested in researching antiques and collectibles, we’d love to hear from you!

Terapeak is preparing to launch a new application via eBay Selling Manager that allows users to research antiques and collectibles data mined from eBay, other online marketplaces, and real-life auction houses. Some of the data is more than a decade old, so you can research almost anything!

If you’re interested in accessing this application for free, and are willing to provide a bit of feedback once you’ve played around with it, please email us at pr@terapeak.com and we’ll add you to our beta list. Remember, you’ve got to be an eBay Selling Manager subscriber to access the application.

We hope to hear from you!

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Terapeak Mobile Merchant and Terapeak Merchant Analytics unveiled at PayPal X Innovate 2009

Two weeks ago, we told you that Terapeak’s parent company, Advanced Ecommerce Research Systems, would be making a pair of exciting announcements at the inaugural PayPal X Innovate 2009 Developer Conference… and now that the cat’s out of the bag, we can tell you more!

At the event in San Francisco, the AERS team unveiled its plans for Terapeak Analytics, a family of tools that uses your historical and real-time PayPal data to deliver visual and statistical insight into your ecommerce business. With Terapeak Analytics, you’ll be able to better understand your business, and make faster, more profitable decisions.

The first of two tools is called Terapeak Mobile Merchant, a real-time business analytics application designed for use with the Apple iPhone. You can see sales trends and transaction details quickly and visually, and review your recent and real-time PayPal data any time, any place.

The second application is Terapeak Merchant Analytics, a real-time business monitoring and analytics solution. You can gain insight into important facets of your business, from buyer gender to currency breakdown, by viewing analytics from up to five years of historical and real-time PayPal merchant data. With Terapeak Merchant Analytics, you can base your business decisions on real-time insights from your own data.

The AERS/Terapeak teams are excited to bring you more about these new tools and developments, and if you’d like to stay in the loop, there’s a sign-up form on the Terapeak Analytics information page over at AERS.

Congratulations, team!

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Keywords, Keywords, Keywords: Terapeak beefs up Title Builder tool!

Always a hot topic among eBay sellers is how to optimize keyword choices when building listings. With that in mind, the Terapeak team is constantly looking at ways to enhance and develop its keyword research, and has this week launched an improvement to the existing Title Builder tool.

For those who don’t know, Title Builder helps subscribers build effective titles using a smart-search algorithm that pulls the top recurring keywords associated with an initial keyword entered into a search bar. And whereas this search formerly sampled 400 listings, it now draws from 1,000, for greater breadth of keyword research.

Since value can be gauged in a number of ways, depending on the item, Title Builder results tell you not only the frequency of shared listings, but also the average, maximum and minimum prices associated with each keyword. By choosing appropriate, high value keywords, sellers are far more likely to draw buyer traffic toward their listings.

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(Click on image to see larger version)

As an example of how you might use the Title Builder, imagine you’re selling a pair of Reef Sandals (kind of like the image above!). Obviously you’ll want to include sizing information, but look at the distinction between “Size” and “Sz” — on average, “Sz” as a keyword is worth nearly five dollars more! (Not to mention it requires fewer characters.) Additionally, if the sandals are a new product, you’ll want to include that information — but observe the difference between “New” and “NWT” (“New with tags”): while 25% of sellers will use “NWT“, it’s actually worth six dollars less than simply stating “New.”

These are just a few examples of how important keyword optimization can be, and now, thanks to Terapeak’s recent advancements to Title Builder, we hope you benefit from many, many more!

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Arbitrage 101: Getting to know the International tool

As announced last week, Terapeak has launched a brand new international search tool that allows All-Sites subscribers to search six eBay sites at once (.com, .ca, .co.uk, .com.au, .de, .fr) and receive comprehensive reports that compare sales from each. It’s a feature we feel very excited about, as global sales opportunities continue to open up across the eBay platform.

Today, we’ll take an early look at a few popular searches and see how they stack up across the different eBay sites. Of course, it’s important to always consider language barriers when conducting international searches (especially with regards to .de and .fr), but the following three examples should be popular and branded enough to apply to our purposes here.

Let’s start with a 90-day international search for “ipod nano“:

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As we can see already, results for certain keywords can vary quite drastically from site to site. Just look at the discrepancy in average price and sell-through between Australia and Canada — those are pretty astonishing figures! And even though eBay.ca returns a reasonably small sample size, price and sell-through on the busier sites are also significantly up from those in Australia — certainly enough to warrant listing placement consideration!

Next, let’s look at the 5th-most popular eBay search, “wii“:

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As a search term, “Wii” of course encompasses many different products — everything from consoles to games, to the smallest of accessories — but the sample size for this search is big enough to assume a reasonable level of balance across the board. And what can we conclude? Well, Germany seems like a good place for Wii sellers (highest average price by far, second-highest sell-through), while the UK (lowest prices, lowest sell-through) lags far behind.

Finally, let’s have a look at the “Twilight” phenomenon:

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Judging by sell-through rates, there appears to be an especially-high demand for the books in both Australia and France (they’ve of course been translated), and reasonably consistent pricing (except in France) across the board.

That’s all for now, but expect  the blog to detail more examples of effective arbitrage in the future!

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eBay Globetrotters: Terapeak launches International search tool!

If you’re a Terapeak All-Sites subscriber, you may have noticed a new “International” tab in your Search menu this morning…

What that is is our brand new International search tool!

Basically, it’s a new report that allows you to search six eBay sites at once (US, UK, CAN, AUS, GER, FRA) and compare the sales of each in terms of Successful Listings, Sell-Through, Average Price, Buyer Country Sales Distribution, Seller Country Sales Distribution, and Transaction Site Sales Distribution. Click on the following screenshot for a closer look (a fourth pie chart is cut off at the bottom, but you get the point!):

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Here at Terapeak, we’re excited about the possibilities and new found ease of optimizing which eBay site to sell on, as closing prices can vary quite drastically from country to country. Now, with this international arbitrage feature, one single search can show you which of the six sites offers the best venue for your product.

Again, this feature is available free of charge to anyone with an All-Sites subscription. And stay tuned in the coming days for more news and examples of how this new tool can be used!

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eBay Selling Manager: Starring Terapeak!

If you’ve been following the Web 2.0 Expo going on in San Francisco this week, you’ve heard eBay’s big announcement: the Selling Manager platform is now allowing third-party developers to embed their applications directly on eBay.com.

Sound confusing? It’s really not. In fact, eBay has put together the following video overview of the Selling Manager service — and check out who stars in a leading role! That’s right, Terapeak!

We’re thrilled to have been such an active participant in the project’s development, and we look forward to seeing new shifts in the eBay landscape.

Finally, not to be outdone, Terapeak put together its own little video for the Expo — check it out!

Be sure to stay tuned for more news about Selling Manager developments, and possibly news from Web 2.0!

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Launch Party: Terapeak goes live with exciting new features!

It’s here!

We teased it at the end of our March newsletter, but today marks the day we officially reveal and launch a series of new improvements to the Terapeak tool. We’ve been working our tails off over the past few months, building, tweaking, and Terapeak-ing these new additions, and we’re thrilled to be able to finally go live with them.

Below, please find a list of all the ways you’ll benefit as a Terapeak subscriber — and remember, these improvements require no changes to your account, no extra fees on your part, no changes to your preferences.

FP-30: View individual items soon after they sell!

In our eyes, FP-30 data was the grandaddy priority in terms of providing you the most exact eBay research possible — and now, thanks to a ton of hard work by our development team, we’re finally able to account in full for FP-30 data in our reporting metrics.

So, not only is Terapeak now offering faster data transmission from eBay to you, we will also report on individual item sales from FP-30 duration listings as each individual item is sold. This means you’ll receive the freshest, most accurate data available on the marketplace today.

We know the rise of FP-30 listings on eBay has been contentious to your research as Terapeak subscribers, so again, we’re thrilled to have worked this one out for you!

Sell Internationally: Find new opportunities!

If you’re an international seller with the Terapeak “All-Sites” package, you’ll now have the ability to search all six international sites at once — so, with a click of your mouse receive reports on sales from the US, UK, Canada, Australia, France and Germany. Use this new feature to arbitrage your goods across eBay platforms, compare markets, and find new opportunities for your online business. Extend your business’ reach by knowing each marketplace.

Value Track: Be efficient, save time on research!

Value Track is a new tool that does just what its name says — it tracks the value and sales rate of all your favorite searches, and packages the results in a nice little stock-chart for you to look at every week. Your regular Terapeak subscription supports up to 25 items on your Value Track — or, if you need more, we can make that happen as well!

Sleeker Look, Stronger Servers = Faster Searches!

Finally (though we guess this isn’t so much a feature per se), new innovations in server technology, combined with a sleeker, slimmer, scaled-down Terapeak, mean optimal speed for every kind of search.

(Optimal speed: fast.)

And stay tuned for even more!

The growth doesn’t stop here, as we’ve got another host of upgrades ready to roll out in the very near future. As always, you’ll be updated, and we hope you’ll share our excitement!

Thanks for taking the time to read about these advancements, and for being a Terapeak subscriber!

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Terapeak Feature Launch: Track eBay Fixed Price 30 Listings as they Sell

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!

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Console Yourself: Terapeak launches Video Games index

Phew! It’s been a long while since we launched a new index — but that’s what the holidaze can do to you! Anyway, we’re back with one of our coolest yet: video game consoles, which continue to be among the hottest-selling items on eBay.

Like our other indexes, this one tracks systems on a basis of total items sold, average price, and total sales over the past 30 days — but it gets pretty unique after that! Not only does the video game index compare next-gen console sales (Wii, 360, PS3) head-to-head, there are also options to compare handheld systems (DS, PSP) and even last-gen consoles (PS2, XBox, GameCube, Dreamcast).

And as always, the index comes paired with a bloggable widget, which you can find an HTML link to at the bottom of the screen. Check it out here!

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heartWhat our clients say?

The US data is amazing - I have learned a lot in just a few short hours.
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I love Terapeak - what a great little tool. I've had it less than 2 weeks and it's already paid for my annual subscription.
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I just wanted to say I love your product. It has made a huge difference in my Ebay sales in a short time. Thank you very much.
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Terapeak gives me the tools I need to maximize my sales & I was able to qualify for eBay's Top Rated Seller in my first 3 months of selling!
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My sell-through rate is consistently over 55% and a large part of that success is due to Terapeak!
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A day without Terapeak is a missed opportunity to make a profit...
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With Terapeak research I don't have to guess when sourcing new product. I know what sells, when it sells and for how much it sells.
- Carol, AlphaBargains.com & OSI Rock Star
Terapeak gives you all the information you need in a format that is understandable and concise.
- Lisa, www.GoingGoingGoneIL.com, OSI Rock Star
Terapeak helped me evaluate subniches and I was able to avoid costly mistakes of buying glass that looked great on paper until I found it sold slowly and priced too low to make a profit.
- Kathy, www.CatladykatesGlass.com & OSI Rock Star
As an eBay Trading Assistant & Educational Specialist I couldn't be without this tool - I always recommend TERAPEAK to my students & when selling for others.
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I can't imagine my business without my Terapeak membership. I sell for others so I rarely sell the same item twice. Terapeak helps me daily.
- Lisa, www.GoingGoingGoneIL.com, OSI Rock Star
Terapeaks rocks! My sub-category is basically all Fixed-Price and Terapeak is the ONLY way to quickly find out what designs are selling the best!
- Cheryl, www.GreenCastleDesigns.com, OSI Rock Star
I used Terapeak to evaluate my competitors' marketing and found strategies that worked and was surprised how many sellers lose money due to poor pricing and marketing.
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