Today, we’re reviewing the online research and informational tool called Terapeak, and learning how it can help you to improve your online business.
Terapeak is the #1 tool I use regularly, because it helps me to research new businesses, find new products, and refine the titles and keywords for my current business. I think of it as a jack-of-all-trades tool for selling online, so I wholeheartedly recommend you have this tool in your arsenal, because it will make a big difference.
You can get a free seven-day trial of it from the Terapeak website if you’d like to give it a shot before purchasing. Past the trial period, it’s $30 (or about £18 for those of you in the UK) – it’s not cheap, but it’s not expensive for the value you’re getting. If you’re not making what you’re paying for your subscription, you’re using Terapeak the wrong way.
I used Terapeak and its data to build and entirely new business. When I started researching my latest business, I thought I knew all there was to know about men’s clothing (which is what I sell), but Terapeak exposed me to so many new popular brands. I’d say I tripled the amount of brands in my store using Terapeak, which of course leads to new sales. But Terapeak isn’t just limited to clothes – it could apply to any market.
Terapeak is the only company with direct access to the eBay market research data. It’s basically a massive data-crunching machine. Put in a few variables, and it’ll give you facts about what’s going on over on eBay in regards to those keywords.
If you follow this link, it’ll take you to the Terapeak homepage. If you sign up for your subscription, you’ll have access to the app on your phone, much like the one you ought to see on the Terapeak homepage. Take this into the field with you as you’re buying new products so you’ll have every piece of data needed in the palm of your hand.
Click on the button that says, “Try Terapeak for free”, and it’ll take you to a page with the header, “Start your 7 day free trial and begin researching instantly”. You’ve got a few option from here. If you’re in the US, you’ll be set to use eBay.com, which is the default site listed as an option in the dropdown bar in the column under the $29.95/month option, but if you’re not in the US, make sure to select your own country to get data relevant to your country’s version of eBay. If you’ve got the $239.40 at the moment, you could opt to be billed for a whole year at once, which will save you about 50% of the price. From here, it will ask for your personal details.
Using my account, let’s take a look at what it looks like on the inside (well, as much as I can, since it is a paid website).
There’s a notification on my account that let’s me know that Terapeak now offers data from Amazon as well as eBay, which is awesome. I sell on Amazon, and there’s plenty of money in that. I haven’t personally gone through that new feature yet, but I can just about promise that it will be awesome, and I’ll do another video and blog post when I go through it. For now, let’s check out the eBay side of things.
On the top menu bar, you’ve got options for “Product Research”, “Competitor Research”, “Category Research”, “Hot Research”, “My Research”, and “Title Builder”. Just below these options is a search bar, in which you can insert your current eBay titles. It tells you, “This site researches 55 million auction titles worldwide to help you build a more profitable eBay title. Enter some keywords and press ‘go’ to receive suggestions to add to your title that will improve the performance of your listing.” This uses real facts and data to help you improve your titles.
The “My Research” tab keeps track of the sellers and keywords you’re keeping and eye on, and it’ll give you their latest data, which you can export to CSV or Excel format. You could also have it email you a summary report weekly to keep you up to date on what’s going on with these people or keywords. This helps you to monitor your niche in an organized way, helping you spot and anticipate changes in real time
In the “Hot Research” tab, you can examine hot categories, media, products, keywords, and titles, as well as rankings for the current month and previous month.
In the “Category Research” tab, you have marked and color-coded information about specific categories and the items selling in them. This allows you to hone in on what’s the hottest category before you even get started selling, to avoid selling unwanted products in cold categories and keywords. You can use this tool to find something that sells well without a lot of competition, which will optimize your own personal sales.
Over in the “Competitor Research” tab, you find people selling similar items, plug their details into this tool, and you can see what they’re selling. If you’re going to look around eBay for the type of things you’re selling, find the sellers with the massive feedback and selling lots of stuff. Stick their username in this tool, and your eyes will be opened to all their details – how much they’re making, how much they’re selling, their best-selling products, which day of the week they sell the most, which time of the day they sell the most, and everything else you could wish to know. Finding a popular product you’re unfamiliar with by way of this tool helps you to know what to do your product research on. I’ve personally had great success with these tools.
Finally, you’ve got the “Product Research” tab. If you’re using the mobile app, you’ll see this big search box by default. You can set when the tool should search, and it tells you what’s been going on for the product you’ve plugged in during the set amount of time. Terapeak used “Starwars Lego” for the past week for their example, so I do the same in the video to try and avoid Terapeak being angry with me for giving too much away. Using this tool, you can see the average price for the item, the highest price, the starting price, the average shipping costs, how many listings there were, how many of those listings sold, which days of the week the product sold the best, how many sold at what time of day, the average listing duration, listing promotions, listing types, categories it was listed under, and some general statistics about the item and how it’s selling. You can refine your search to graphical views, information about the top-sellers for this product (and then put their information into the aforementioned “Competitor Research” tab). If you’ve got a search you’d like to keep an eye on, you have the option to pin it so you can access it regularly from the “My Research” tab.
There’s a lot of money to be made on eBay, and you can tap into that by using this wonderfully helpful tool. Don’t leave anything about your business open to chance; assure that you’ll be making money by using Terapeak.
I’ll be doing an advanced guide in the future, but this is more of a show-and-tell so you can see how powerful this tool is. I wholeheartedly advise you check out the video below for the visual walkthrough of what you’ve read about the wonderful features of Terapeak. In the video, we actually click through the website, and if you’d like to supplement simply reading about what it can do, watch the video below.
