Dec
8
Learning What I Don’t Know about eBay
Filed Under Auction Tools, Reviews
A Review of Terapeak.com
As the owner of AuctionInsights.com, I frequently receive requests from businesses to review their latest eBay tool or service. Such was the e-mail I recently received from Chris Smith of Terapeak.com.
After a month of procrastinating, last week I finally made time to give Terapeak a test-spin. I only wish I has access to this useful tool a few months ago when I was selling off my collection of Star Wars comics.
Terapeak is a data-mining service for eBay sellers. The toolset is the only service currently authorized by eBay to perform statistical analysis of the auction site’s closed auctions and categories. Terapeak helps eBay users sell more effectively by providing them the information they need to effectively understand and predict the performance of their auction listings by highlighting market trends.
Using Terapeak, I compared success (and failures) of a month’s worth of closed auctions with the term “Star Wars comic” in the listing title. I was interested in learning the average selling price, average number of bids, the most successful closing day of the week and time, and average opening bid of the most successful auctions. I was also interested in knowing if features like bold, highlighting, or “Buy It Now” made an appreciable difference for the comic book sellers that employed them.
The results were startling. I learned for the month of November 2004, the average selling price of a Star Wars comic listed in the category in which I used (Collectables, Comics, Bronze Age (1970-1979) Horror & Sci Fi) was less than half the price ($5.40) of the average selling price of a Star Wars comic across all of eBay’s categories ($13.00). The Terapeak results page prominently displays all the major categories in which your item of interest was listed during the period researched, so I was able to quickly drill down and discover which categories were outperforming the one I normally use.
Interestingly, the Action Figures category (Toys & Hobbies, Action Figures, Star Wars, Prequels) had an average selling price of $16.37 (three times that of my category) and over twice (76.47%) the successful auction close rate of my normal category (36.96%). I also learned that three day listings for Star Wars Comics were much more successful in closing with a bid than the seven day listing periods I used. Additionally, I was surprised to see that sellers who employed the “Buy It Now” feature enjoyed a whopping 100% success rate. Amazing information…and I was only just scratching the surface of what I could glean from this service.
Terapeak offers two versions of its toolset: Terapeak Lite, which limits price searches to one day of closed auctions at a time for $9.95 USD per month and Terapeak Research Complete, which enables users to search and aggregate up to 30 days of eBay data at time for $16.95 USD per month.
As my Granddad always said, “You don’t know what you don’t know.” Terapeak helped me to quickly learn what I didn’t know when I was selling off my Star Wars comic collection. With Terapeak’s help, I won’t be making the same mistakes when I sell off my X-Men comics later this month.
An AuctionInsights.com recommended eBay tool.
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Hello, I just found your site & I must say your a a pretty helpfull person, allmost all of the information sites charge you!? I checked out the terapeak website and man would I love to be able to afford this rite now. Im just starting out trying to do the business thing (consignment to sell online)
and a tool like this would be great looks like it could really be usefull