Baseball, as a sport, has always lent itself to stories. In any given season, there are hundreds of them—from no-hitters to clubhouse quitters, bench-clearing brawls to disputed home run balls. There are redemption stories, suspension stories, crime dramas, and, once—we still can’t believe this actually happened—a female college student dressed as a foam sausage getting bat-thwacked by crazy Pirates infielder Randall Simon. (The latter could also fall under crime drama—Simon was charged with battery.)

One other plotline you can always count on is the emergence of star rookies. Last year it was Japan’s Daisuke Matsuzaka debuting, uh, quietly, in the AL, while the NL’s smooth-swinging Ryan Braun waged one of the best rookie batting campaigns in diamond history. In 2006, it was Hanley Ramirez and Justin Verlander; in 2005, Ryan Howard and Huston Street.

This year’s rookie crop is no less newsworthy, and it’s been interesting to track the trajectories of their respective eBay-sales seasons. When the year began, Rays third baseman Evan Longoria was a name bandied about by all baseball pundits (and not just based on that name­—there’s no relation). Today, hot off his first All-Star selection, Longoria’s July total listings have already doubled what we saw in May. He’s also a pretty safe bet for Rookie of the Year, and, maybe someday, an MVP or two.

In the NL, meanwhile, the hype surrounding Reds prospect Jay Bruce was enough that, despite spending most of May playing for AAA Louisville, his eBay listings for that month surpassed 2,500. After being called up, however, and the rip-roaring two weeks that ensued, his June numbers rocketed past 8,000. Bruce’s on-field play has since cooled off, but his July listings (3,000+) are still more than double the combined totals of presumptive NL ROY frontrunners Geovany Soto and Edinson Volquez.

As for the rest, there’s only one rook outselling both Bruce and Longoria, and that’s fire-ballin’, fist-pumpin’, Nebraska-reppin’ Joba Chamberlain. But he’s a Yankee. Not fair.

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.

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.

Topic: Keywords, Keywords, Keywords and Listing Titles Too!
Host: Terapeak
Date: Friday July 18
Time: 11:00 a.m. to 12:00 p.m. PST

Visit the eBay Workshop Board

Join Denise from Terapeak Marketplace Research to explore ways to use market research and find top dollar keywords. Your eBay listings have a 55 character store front, and that is your customer’s gateway to your items! Are you using the best keywords for your item, and are you maximizing your exposure? We’ll review a few simple methods to evaluate keywords using Terapeak research using some topical examples. The workshop will be open for the hour for any questions related to research and your eBay sales.

One of our favorite events here at the Terapeak office is eBay Live! It’s a unique opportunity for us to gather feedback from our current users, introduce new users to the concept of market research, and spend a few days with a great crowd of energetic and successful sellers.

After three days of speaking with the general public, I came away with a few observations:

1. Any economic downturn that the US may be experiencing is not affecting the profits of sellers who sell internationally. I spoke with a lot of people who said that they are netting even more than last year after opening up to international buyers and/or arbitraging goods on the international eBay platforms.
2. Lots of people know who we are, (Terapeak!) and use research to build their business. Numerous people simply stopped by the booth to let us know how much they use their Terapeak subscription. We all love to hear that!
3. debate of Buyer support vs. Seller support rages on. Sure, eBay is focusing on the buyer experience heavily right now (as mentioned in the keynote speech), but they are building help for the sellers as well – look at project Echo – a new feature in development for launch 2009 that will allow outside applications to be included within the eBay platform. The impetus of this is to help sellers, and it’s a project we’ve been very active in from the start, since our tools are seller tools!
4. Feedback is still an issue. Not a lot of sellers seemed thrilled at the new format, but are looking optimistically to eBay to make more improvements.
5. Chris Issak? Still very cool. And Sara and I were excited to see that he still has the same drummer he had on his TV show. Jugglers? Still not cool. Funny banter though, I will give them that J.

If you were at Live! this year, it was great to see you there, and I hope you had as much fun as the Terapeak team did. If you weren’t, we’ll see you in Florida in 2010.

Were you at eBay Live! ? There’s room in the comments below for your observations.

denise

Participants at the eBay Developers Conference in Chicago today got a sneak peek at an exciting new eBay initiative that Terapeak has been involved with, called Project Echo. Since we are always looking for new and innovative ways to bring research to the market, Terapeak has been an active participant in this project from the start. Project Echo was spearheaded by eBay so that developers can easily create on-eBay applications, using a new set of developer APIs.

This new accessibility for developers is similar to Facebook opening its platform for applications. The difference here is that eBay applications will focus on improving sales and service within the eBay community. The integration of Terapeak was straightforward, thanks to eBay’s dev friendly focus and Terapeak’s versatility. The entire project was completed within a very short timeframe.

The Terapeak project not only includes access to Terapeak research, but an integrated inventory tool, which allows sellers to evaluate their inventory and receive fresh pricing data as the market evolves. Set to launch in early 2009, eBayers will be able to access Terapeak and other services directly within the eBay platform!

Check out the TechCrunch mention!

Terapeak’s iPhone Index is now online! This new index provides a very cool way to keep watch on the evolving iPhone market. The embeddable widget tracks locked vs. unlocked iPhone sales on eBay, and the differences are really interesting. You can add your affiliate id to the widget for marketing, and, due to the widget-based nature of the index, you can share near real-time data by embedding it into your blogs!

Share data like…the average price for a locked iPhone was $493.53 at time of writing. The average unlocked iPhone is selling for considerably more – $603.05. This same time frame saw 354 unlocked iPhones sold in a single day, and only 139 locked ones. This reveals a significant market preference for the unlocked iPhones! In total, $60,075 worth of locked iPhones sold in a single day, while the vastly more popular unlocked iPhones scored $192,808 in sales (that’s more than three times of the locked revenue).

Fred Speckeen, CEO of parent company AERS Inc., says, “This widget is a lot of fun. It sits on top of a tremendous mine of ecommerce information. Our Fortune 500 clients benefit tremendously from our price, volume, buyer demographics and geographic analytics. Updated daily, our analytics show today what will be news for their competitors three months from now…”

As iPhone aficionados everywhere watched Steve Jobs’ much anticipated keynote speech at the June 9th Apple Worldwide Developers Conference, and the resulting release of the 3G iPhone, means the iPhone Index will be one to watch as the market changes.

Please visit www.terapeak.com/iphone to view the entire index, and grab your own embeddable widget to share from the top right hand corner of the index!

As the big budget film Iron Man hits theatres this week, demand for Silver age Iron Man comics has soared as well.
According to results found using Terapeak’s Hot Categories research tool, Iron man comics from between 1956 and 1969 are super hot on eBay this week.

This trend chart shows the last two years of activity in category #32735:

As you can see, listings and sales are both way up. Last week over 600 listings were posted in this category, generating $27K in sales.
That’s impressive activity for 40-50 year old collectibles. Notable listings this month:
IRON MAN & SUB-MARINER # 1 (1968) sold for $4650.00, making it the highest priced listing in this category in April.
The INVINCIBLE IRON MAN Complete Collection DVD ROM was the most frequently listed title in April. Digital formats for comic books are a growing industry.
Iron Man, starring Robert Downey Jr. and Gwyneth Paltrow, opens in theatres across North America on May 2nd, 2008.

Hello! Welcome to a new era of Terapeak research!

This week we launched Terapeak 5.0, the next generation of our existing site that incorporates not only a fresh new look and feel (and oh yeah, it’s faster too) but also some unique new features.

Those of you familiar with the site will notice that Terapeak now includes actual seller ID’s in all reporting (no more hashed number reports) and numerical totals in the category trending (previously it was percentage of total value). For example:

We can see that the week ending March 09, 2008, $429.88 K of sales occurred in the
Consumer Electronics > Televisions > LCD Flat-Panel TVs > 40-49 inch LCD TVs
category.

We’ve also taken our user’s feedback to heart and developed new tools that answer a question we hear everyday, “what can I sell on eBay?” Our new Hot Research tools make finding hot products and discovering new niches easier by providing you with information on what eBay shoppers are actively searching for, and what items are topping the sales within sub categories. The following is a report on the Hot Products within the Clothing, Shoes & Accessories > Men’s Clothing > Shirts > Casual category:

The Terapeak team is very proud of the 5.0 site, and we all hope that you’ll check out our new features, and our new interface! For more information, drop us a line here or at support@terapeak.com

-denise