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!

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.

(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!

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“:

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“:

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:

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!

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!):

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!

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!

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!

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!

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!

Sweet!

So do we!

If you’re hooked on Twitter, please add Terapeak to your feed to keep track of the latest activity in the Terapeak offices. We’ll try to add the latest news there, as it happens!

One of several exciting additions we’ve been cooking up for the new year, Value Track is a tool that collects frequent searches and automates data trends on a week-to-week basis. The grid breaks down kind of like a stock chart, and allows you to track product movement in terms of average price, number of listings, and aggregate success rate. This will be especially useful for sellers with interest across several specific areas, as well as anyone who feels like “watching” a certain category for a few weeks to gauge its potential.

BUT, before we make this tool available to everybody, we want to make absolute certain that it’s as good as it can be — and that’s where you come in!

For a limited time, if you sign up to Beta test Value Track for us, we’ll show our appreciation by giving you two months’ free access to the tool, beginning when it is officially launched (probably next month). If you’d like to take part, all you need to do is log in to your Terapeak account and follow the “Terapeak Value Track” message that pops up. Then, sometime in the next few weeks, we’ll send along a survey for you to fill out, and voila! Free Value Track!

Thanks, we really appreciate it!