Terapeak - Take your eCommerce business to the next level

Terapeak review | Basic info & stats

Founded in 2002, Terapeak has a strong focus on eBay sellers. At the heart of Terapeak lies the ability to quickly and effectively research products on eBay and Amazon. This is the feature most sellers sign up for. We’ll go into it in detail further into this review, but it’s enough to say that it can seriously boost your eBay business.

Once you have found a product with an attractive sales volume, you will be able to source the product through Terapeak’s integration with Alibaba. This can significantly reduce the amount of time it takes finding a supplier who can deliver the stock at significantly below retail price, giving you a healthy profit-margin.

Terapeak also impresses with a slick new sales dashboard called MySales which displays key revenue data of any online selling account you may have connected. For eBay and Amazon sellers in the process of turning professional, the dashboard alone can therefore be a revelation.

Next, Terapeak provides access to a host of historical data which lets you identify niches and categories which are likely to do well in the coming months. This gives you a strong advantage over your competitors who won’t have the data they need to prepare. With this information, you can find a good supplier and hit the ground running when the time comes.

Finally, Terapeak has rolled out extensive competitor analysis data, showing you who sells what, and how much profit they are likely making. On top of that, you also get to the number of successful listings, total bids and items sold which are invaluable in figuring out your best selling strategy.

Finding profitable niches

As a professional seller, the first thing you need to think about is which niche you want to become involved in? For those of you still new to this; a niche is basically an opportunity to serve the needs of a smaller audience with specialised products.

To illustrate this point, let’s take a good example. In the early 2000’s mobile phones were becoming more popular and by 2007, the iPhone had made them mainstream. Although there was clearly no way for online sellers to create their own phones and compete with the likes of Nokia, Apple and Samsung, there was still a way for them to make a healthy profit in this new ecosystem.

Thus, thousands of entrepreneurs started selling items like phone cases, external batteries and protective covers, which had the benefit of being less capital intensive and having much weaker competition. By 2012 however, the big players had cottoned on, and now the niche is incredible hard to compete in.

This brings us to the most important reason to understand and exploit niches: the lack of well-funded competition. The more sellers and supply available, the more prices get pushed down as everyone competes to make the sale. This shrinks your profit-margin and the profitability of your business.

Therefore, finding a profitable niche is imperative to your online selling success. With everyone on the lookout though, finding a good niche in what seems like a saturated market can be tough.

Here are a few factors to look out for:

1. The demand and price of products in the niche/category will be growing
    
2. Sales volume will be growing as more items are sold month over month
    
3. The total sales revenue will still be low, showing that this niche is still young
    
4. The average number of sellers and supply will be low, meaning less competition
    

Terapeak provides the necessary information for all four points listed here, making it much easier to spot a good niche.

Finding the right product to sell with Terapeak

With many of Terapeak’s features, sellers are given bucket-loads of data and left to figure it out on their own. Their research feature is a welcome exception here, and sellers are given a meaningful leg up in finding the best possible products to sell.

First, we need to understand that there are four different ways Terapeak let’s you do your research. These are:

1. Hot research
    
2. Product research
    
3. Category research
    
4. Competitor research
    

The best, in my opinion, is the category research, which gives you a great overview of the total sales volume for each category. These are then clearly labeled, showing you which products in which categories enjoy high sales volume and which don’t. Looking at this data now (14/11/2016), would show you that the category “Sporting Goods” is seeing high sales for “hunting” equipment and low sales for “Fishing” equipment.

If we then click on a category, “Sporting Goods” for example, we are given even more granular, product level information. Sub-categories like “Scooters”, are then divided into “Electric Scooters”, “Parts & Accessories”, “Gas Scooters” etc. each labeled and ordered by their total sales volume.

If we wanted to become active in this niche, we would try to source the product with the highest sales volume, in this case “Electric Scooters”, rather than the product with low sales volume, like “Gas Scooters”. You can see how Terapeak’s category research feature has already given us invaluable insights into which products to sell.

This granular approach, coupled with large quantities of data are what makes this feature so awesome.

Next, we can click on any given sub-category, “Electric Scooters” again for example, to see all relevant historical sales data for the top selling products. The information we get here is precise and important, covering:

• The item title
   
• Whether it was sold
   
• The format (bid or buy now)
   
• The starting price
   
• The end price
   
• The number of total bids
   
• The end date

Terapeak Features

There are a variety of features within this software but the one that is used the most is probably the product research feature.

Before selling anything on any platform, you must research the product and see if there is a market for it. This goes for selling items on eBay and this is where Terapeak comes in and saves you a lot of time and makes the research process more efficient.

As you can see from the image below, the research tab as 4 options to choose from. Product research 2.0 is in beta and so I will use the original to show examples of what kind of product data can be extracted for to help eBay sellers with their business.

Some people prefer the category research, although it provides a lot of data, personally I prefer the product research feature.

The amount of data that can be pulled from this feature is amazing and for any eBay seller this will improve their sales performance if utilised properly.

As you can see from the image below, there are many filters that can be applied that will provide a more accurate representation of the data for the product you are researching.

You can apply the following filters to reveal even more detailed stats

• Item condition
• Price range
• Time of day sales are made
• Duration of the listings
• Type of listings
• Different eBay sites
• Up to 90 days’ sales data

To show you the power of this software,I searched for the term ‘Golf trolleys’ on eBay UK and applied the following  options:

• 30 days sales data
• Brand new items
• Fixed price
• UK eBay site

Terapeak Pricing

Terapeak has three plans, they are as follows:

• Research – The main plan, this where you will have access to everything described in this review. The payment is billed annually at £13.72 per month. In my opinion, this is the best option.
• My Sales Pro – I didn’t go into this plan because it is for those who are selling on eBay, Amazon or Shopify that want to link their accounts and get historical sales data. Also billed annually at £10.97 per month.
• SEO Pro – This is included in the research plan, but if you just want SEO data for listing and how to rank high in eBay search and other search engines, SEO pro will provide you with that data. £3.82 per month billed annually.
• 3 Year Data- add on – This plan gives you 3 years of sales data of any product,to purchase this you have to have purchased either the Research or My Sales Pro. This is billed annually at £27.47 per month 

Terapeak offers a 7- day free trial for any of the plans, there are no limitations and you get to access all the features within that trial period.

I would have preferred a 2-week trial period as I think this gives enough time to fully test all the features and see if you are getting any sales improvement.

Is Terapeak for you?

If you want to be a serious eBay seller and run a scalable ecommerce business on its platform then I think a research tool is a necessity. Terpeak is the best eBay research tool on the market and you should improve your sales performance by utilising its features.

However, even if you don’t plan on selling eBay but want to become an eBay affiliate, I still think this tool can help you find some profitable niches to start promoting. It was through this tool that I found out just how profitable the golf niche was and how easy it is to rank for many keywords related to the golfing niche.

Conclusion

This is definitely a tool to purchase if you want to sell on eBay, its product research features alone is enough to greatly improve your sales performance. The amount of data that can be pulled is very detailed and will help in choosing the right product to start selling on eBay.

The SEO research feature alone will help you increase your sales by optimising your listings and seeing higher conversion rates.

You can access sales trends, discover new opportunities and carry competitor analysis, with this data you can vastly improve your eBay business and look to scale even further.