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!

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!

Since launching in June 2007, iPhones and iPhone accessories have consistently been among the most hotly-contested items on eBay. Naturally, here at Terapeak, we’ve had a keen interest in iPhones since their inception, while also keeping in mind that when a product emerges as successfully as the iPhone, one of the best things you can do is keep an eye on that product’s competition.

Last September we added Blackberry metrics to our iPhone index, and since the November release of Blackberry’s latest model, the Storm, it’s been interesting to watch the trend line turn.

Above is a still shot of total items sold for the month of November. As you can see, iPhone sales remained generally strong, while Blackberry sales got a major boost, particularly following the Storm’s U.S. release.

None of this should come as any surprise, but rather further proof that forward-thinking sellers always benefit from high-profile market competition — especially with regards to advancements in the technology industry.

Do you love Terapeak? Do you have an iPhone?

Check this out:

That’s right, it’s our new iPhone application, which allows you to access Terapeak Marketplace Research right on your iPhone. It’s still in Beta stage, but it’s testing really well — and, if you’ve got an iPhone yourself, we’d love you to try it out!

If you’re interested, send an email to support@terapeak.com (subject “iphone”) and we’ll shoot you the URL!

Thanks!

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!