Terapeak Product Research 2.0 Giving Different Results!?

Two months ago Terapeak released a brand new product research tool called – Product Research 2.0 and this has created some confusion amongst regular Terapeak users because the OLD Product Research tool is still available too. And in many cases you’ll get different numbers/data from these two tools when searching for the exact same keywords. So why is this happening?

First of all – the new Product Research 2.0 is a totally new algorithm/engine that Terapeak is still working on – it’s not completely finished so we’ll see more functions added to it in the very near future. Currently it gives us basic data for each product and the biggest advantage is the SPEED at which this data is presented to us in comparison to the old product research tool.

Another great advantage of the new tool is that it gives us the option to select the product category right from the search box – this can save a lot of time as we don’t have to manually select categories like we used to, to get more accurate results.

Along with category suggestions, it will also show us related products/search terms to the keyword that we’re searching for:

So these are great new features and together with much faster loading times, the new product research tools looks really promising!

But going back to the original question on why we sometimes get different data using the old and new product research tool?

Actually, let’s do a “live” example. I’ll search for “exercise mat” using the new tool, getting these results:

I did the research for eBay UK, for the last 30 days, with no filters applied:

• Number of sellers – 554
• Items Sold – 13,634
• Average price – £13.76
• Shipping Average/FREE % – £5.30/89.72%
• Total Sales – £180,496.45

Now let’s use the old product research tool and search for the exact same keyword – “exercise mat” and see what kind of results we get. This time I had to manually select the “Sporting Goods” category but everything else is same – last 30 days on eBay UK, no filters applied:

The most important numbers to compare are:

• Sellers per day – 115
• Items sold – 12,657
• Average price – £12.17
• Average shipping – £4.91
• Total sales – £151,099.69

I have left out the sell-through rate and other data as they haven’t been implemented in the new Product Research 2.0 yet.

So let’s take a closer look at each one separately.

Sellers per day/Number of sellers

The old tool gives us a number of 115 and the new one – 554 – why is there such a big difference? Because the old tool gave us the number of sellers for any given SINGLE day, not the whole month! It wasn’t really very accurate as it wouldn’t give us the whole picture on how many other people on average PER MONTH compete for that product.

With the new tool we get the number of UNIQUE sellers that have been offering the item/keyword we research for any given period. This is actually very useful as it’s a more objective number than sellers per day.

Average Shipping

The old tool shows us an average shipping price of £4.91 and the new tool – £5.30

The number is different in new tool as it takes into account more listings than the old tool (more on that in a minute) but what’s more important is that the new tool now shows us both the average shipping cost AND the percentage of listings that offer free shipping.

This be very interesting data when researching new items, especially more bulky items when you want to know what your competitors are doing – do they charge shipping separately or offer free shipping by default?

In our example it shows that 89.72% of sellers for “exercise mat” offer free shipping which means that if you want to compete in this niche, you’ll have no choice but to offer free shipping too, to stay in line with the competition.

Items sold/Average price/Total sales

These are 3 numbers that cause the biggest confusion when comparing data from the old and new Terapeak tools. In most cases, the numbers will be HIGHER using the new tool!

Like in our example:

Items sold: old tool – 12 657 / new tool – 13 634

And obviously this also creates a bigger Total Sales number (as more items are sold) and changes the average price as more listings are taken into account.

Why is this happening?

The new, Product Research 2.0 tool is built on completely new technology, with a built-in ability to compensate for human error. This means that when you search for “exercise mats” for example, the search is missing out on variants like:

• exercise mats
• exercise matts
• exercise matt’s
• etc.

So basically it uses a database of highly related keywords/misspellings to cover as many listings for that search phrase as possible.

And this is exactly why you sometimes get different results with the new tool and why the number is usually higher, as it’s uncovering more listings.

IMPORTANT! As these keyword variations are taken into account, it’s more important than ever to narrow down the product category to what’s most suitable for the product you want to research. Otherwise you may get too broad results which are inaccurate.

I hope that explains why sometimes you get different numbers from the old and new Terapeak product research tool. They’re still working on implementing new features in this new tool but I must say I’m really starting to like it more than the old one – mainly because of how quick it is and the ability to select the category right from the keyword box.

I would prefer if Terapeak would include 2nd and 3rd tier categories in the suggested list too – as with my example of “exercise mats”, even though I got Sporting Goods offered, I would still need to dig deeper and select the Fitness, Running & Yoga category and then a few more subcategories to get really accurate results.

BUT I guess they do this on purpose as it wouldn’t really be possible to show recommended categories going down 3-4 sub-categories – there would simply be too many variations to show.

Still, it’s great that the new tool is much faster as even selecting categories manually is a quick process compared to the old tool, which sometimes took ten seconds or so to load results when you changed the category.

Ok, that’s it for today! I have heard from Terapeak that there are more tools/features that are going to be launched in the very near future – I’ll make sure to keep you updated on any new developments.

I also recently had the idea to create a small/dedicated video course covering Terapeak specifically – which I would then give for free to my blog readers. If this is something you would be interested in, please leave your thoughts in the comments section below. If I do decide to go ahead with this, it’ll only be after all the new tools and features are released, so that the video course covers everything and I don’t have to update it again within a few months.

Thanks,
Andrew