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!
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.
Given the success of our NFL index, and because we’re a Canadian-based company with the moral obligation, we’ve created a new sales index that tracks the eBay sales of all 30 NHL teams. You can sort through league rankings on a division and conference basis, and as usual, see data based on total items sold, total sales, and average price. There’s also a widget (seen below) that fits easily into any blog or webpage.
Not surprisingly, the three biggest money-makers over the past 30 days are Detroit, Pittsburgh and Montreal, with small-market Buffalo in fourth followed by the remaining Original 6 teams. Consider, at the other end of the ice, that the Red Wings are outselling the least-lucrative team on eBay, the Predators, by a ratio of 14-to-1! The rest of the bottom five, in order of “best” to worst, are Carolina, Columbus, Florida, and Atlanta.
With the steady popularity of designer fashion accessories on eBay — women’s handbags in particular — our team at Terapeak decided it would be interesting to compare the sales of a few top-selling brands. Terapeak’s new handbags index tracks the sales of Coach, Dooney & Bourke, Fendi, Gucci, Louis Vuitton, and Prada products in terms of total sales, items sold, and average price.
The result, seen above, is perhaps our most functional and seller-friendly index-widget yet. Based on the past 30 days of closed listings, we can see that Louis Vuitton products go for significantly higher prices than their competitors, while Coach far outsells other manufacturers in terms of quantity. There’s also an option to select one of the bag-makers individually, and to view its stats and trends more closely.
As always, the index comes with a companion widget (shown above) that you can embed easily into any blog or webpage, as well as the ability to conduct your own Terapeak search; that means you can do a search for your own favorite purse, or anything else on eBay.
You can view the full index here, and a link to the widget (”Share”) near the bottom left of the screen.
While reading an article linked to from Techmeme it is easy to see there are various ways to make money selling your old iPhone to get the new iPhone 3G. In theory, people are willing to give up their old iPhone for only $199.99 so that they can purchase their new iPhone 3G for free. We can see by our iPhone Index that the iPhone unlocked or locked is worth well more than that on eBay.
You could even go as far to say it might be possible to sell your old iPhone on eBay and get two iPhone 3G’s for free. Also, if you take a look at the trend on our iPhone Index, you will see the price of unlocked iPhones is skyrocketing! We hope this can help some of our visitors and members to make a quick buck or possibly get the new iPhone 3G and some free cash.
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!
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:
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.
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!
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!
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.
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.
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!
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!
