11/9/07

Make Money on eBay with Terapeak

The following is a paid review for Terapeak.com, which provides free eBay research data. With the holidays approaching fast, everyone needs quick ways to get some extra cash. One of the best ways to build up some extra spending money is via the use of eBay to sell old items and collectibles you might not be using anymore. Or selling items you find at garage sales and yard sales.

Terapeak is a website offering free research data to help make the most of your Ebay sales. According to the company website, they are established as the leader for Ebay research and the only company to focus exclusively on it. The site even includes video and written testimonials from satisfied customers. The videos seemed to come from a busy convention of some sort, making some of them inaudible. However, the fact that this is a free tool to help you make money with eBay can't be overlooked.

Here's the free services you'll get with Terapeak:

- Find the best time of day, day of week, or month for your eBay item sales.

- Price your items for success.

- Choose the best keywords for your titles.

- Know when to list with Buy It Now or for Auction.

I decided to test Terapeak with a search for "ipod nano", and it generated quite a bit of helpful info. Of course this may not be the best term as iPod nano seemed to bring up some other listings including an Apple MacBook which included a Nano in the deal. Once you enter your search item term, you are taken to a very comprehensive screen full of data and graphs/charts. One thing you can check out is which Ebay "Listing Promotions" had the best percentage of sales for the iPod Nano. According to the data, using "Bold" and "Subtitles" actually gave a higher sell through rate for the iPod overall. Checking out the keyword section revealed that having "4gb" in your item listing or title gave it a higher sales price which is to be expected as it is a higher storage capacity. It was interesting to see the time of day receiving highest bid amounts for "ipod" was 6 to 7am or 1 to 2am. Auctions which ran for 10 days on eBay did the best for iPod and Sunday was the best day to end your auction, as it received the highest final sales price/bid.

Each of the 7 data sections are expandable and collapsible and provides you a bar chart display option. You can also click on various filters for your items. For example, with the iPod Nano you may want to limit your search data to only listings from the electronics section of eBay. Below your research data you are also shown 25 ended eBay auctions for the item. Clicking any of them will take you to the actual eBay auction page for that item. It was hard to tell how these particular auctions were chosen as some had end dates as far back as October 30th and none of them seemed close to the present day (Closest ended auction was 11/04). Terapeak offers a decent "Help" section as well, which includes FAQ's on using the site, and 7 video tutorials which show you how to perform research there.

Terapeak will profit from their paid memberships for the site which gives you even more features than the free version. You will be able to look at eBay data which goes 90 days back versus the 30 days you get for free. Also paying seems to allow you to export and save the research data you find, whereas you can only email it for free. The paid membership pricing is $24.95 a month per eBay site you want research for (the US, UK, Australia, Canada, France and Denmark eBay sites). Or you can pay $39.95 per month to be able to perform research on all 6. This may be helpful to those already making good money on eBay, but those looking for a low budget way to do eBay research it's probably best to take advantage of their free services.

As a website, Terapeak has an easy going site and calm blue design that is simple to navigate through. I found the data to be very comprehensive for a free service. They also offer a nice extra section showing the eBay 10 Best sellers in Movies, Albums, Video Games and Books. This section is also free and just might be helpful to those looking for items to sell on eBay, or even those looking to get more out of AuctionAds. You can also add these top 10 lists to your own site or blog as Terapeak offers java code for each.

Overall, Terapeak seems like a helpful and powerful free tool which pulls together a lot of useful eBay data. You can view the site for Terapeak at http://www.terapeak.com.

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