Terapeak are beta testing a new Value Track tool, which allows you to save your favourite eBay searches and weekly reports are then generated showing how these items are performing on eBay. The information is presented in a similar format to share prices highlighting rises and falls on the eBay marketplace.
Value Track reports the change in number of live listings, average price and sell through rates. Creating a list is easy – simply enter the keywords you’re interested in and select the eBay site, category and currency.
We ran the official top 12 Christmas toys for 2008 list (announced by the Toy Retailers Association) into Value Track and you can see the results by clicking the image to the left.
I can see two main benefits of using this tool – firstly for anyone researching a new category it allows them to watch it over a period of time. Value Track will reveal which products are selling well and warn of any items for which sales are slowing.
For existing sellers the changes in average prices will enable you to tweak prices according to availability – if prices are rising because a product is in short supply you want to know about it. Equally if prices are falling you may need to adjust your listings to stay competitive.
For toy sellers who want to track the hottest products in the run up to Christmas it’s a great tool. Any seller will be able to build a similar list of products they wish to track and Value Track will give a weekly breakdown of their performance on eBay highlighting where prices are rising or falling and for which products sell through rates are changing.
Existing Terapeak customers who sign up for the Beta test of Value Track and complete a feedback questionnaire will receive two months free access to the tool when it is officially launched.
Finally, for anyone that was wondering, the Toy Retailers Association top 12 toys this year (which are all available at less than RRP on eBay) are:
, Hasbro (RRP £149.99)
, Flair Leisure Products (RRP £49.99)
, Hasbro (RRP £29.99)
, Vivid Imaginations (RRP £22.99)
, MGA Entertainment Ltd (RRP £29.99)
(RRP £12.99)
, Zapf Creation® (RRP £33.99)
, Mattel (RRP £59.99)
, Bandai (RRP £19.99)
, Bandai (RRP £15.99)
, Character Options (RRP £29.99)
, Hasbro (RRP £34.99)
7 Responses
This is complicated, read slowly. The research terapeak provides only includes information about closed auctions. As we all know about 8 weeks ago eBay pushed it’s sellers to use “good til canceled” or GTC listings instead of auctions. This means terapeak does not report any sales from a seller who has 25 widgets for sale and lists them as a GTC fixed price listing until the listing ends. If other words, terapeak does not reflect reality of what has actually been sold. A large percent of eBays listings are GTC and none of the sales are reported until the quantity is sold to zero or the seller cancels the listings. In a large percentage of cases either of these two events can take months and months to happen. I have personally stopped using terapeak for research because their data is 100% accurate regarding closed auctions, but unfortunately, if you don’t consider the GTC listings the data is worthless.
It’s true the FV30 listings are not included in the research at Terapeak until after they have ended completely. This means that some data may not arrive at our site for 30 days past the sales date. Any research tool providing eBay sales data will have the same issue right now.
We have been working closely with eBay on a solution to add these listing durations to our research. Expect an update with good news shortly. Until then, the data is still full of value as it is reporting on a large amount of closed eBay listings. Remember that many market research firms consider a group of over 1000 points of data to be significant. Terapeak reports on millions a day.
Please feel free to contact us directly if you have any more questions David.
Take care,
denise
Terapeak MR
Denise: I didn’t manage to mention it at Small Business 2.0. But you have fabulous hair. :o)
Dan – lol, well perhaps next year you could work something in, jeez!
Hope all is well over there, keep in touch!
We use Terapeak and the data is amazing. In any form of statistical data there will be variations but Terapeak helps us get a very good picture of what is selling and what is not.
It’s also easy with Best Match to simply search for an item you’re researching on ebay and if someone has a GTC listing with good sales that are missing from the Terapeak data they’ll be somewhere near the top of search results and it’s just a click to see purchase history.
We’ve trebled our ebay sales from last Christmas and a lot of that has had to do with the research we did beforehand with Terapeak.
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Of course we’ve also trebled the ‘where is my stuff’ and ‘do you accept cash through the post’ emails which we could all always do without! 🙂
I have used Terapeak in the past and found it very useful. The only thing I don’t like about Terapeak is that you are obliged to use PayPal. If I could pay with a card I would be more likely to have a running subscription.
Thanks Andy – really good points there, and I’m pleased that Terapeak has helped your business so much – that’s what we’re in it for! You know, besides the fame and fabulousness…So…do you accept cash by post?
Jimbo – sorry you’re stuck with PayPal. We do process credit cards on the Terapeak.com site – maybe shoot [email protected] an email and see if they can help you switch? I
Take care all!
denise