I’m a very happy user of Terapeak’s eBay sales research service, so it is unfortunate that my first mention here should be a complaint, but here goes…
I spend several hours in a typical day looking at pages and pages of items that have sold in the past few months on eBay via Terapeak’s eBay research tools. We have niche-market stores that primarily sell eBay items via the eBay Partner Network and Terapeak allows me to find out detailed information about sales in any given niche. It is hard to overstate how valuable that information is to our business and too obvious to expound upon why it is important. Suffice it to say that our business does better because we subscribe to the Terapeak service and I have no thoughts of cancelling the service.
Now, on to my complaint. As mentioned, our stores are niche stores. Many draw items from only one eBay category and it is unusual for us to use more than a few eBay categories to build a site. For that reason, most of my Terapeak searches are focused only on one eBay category. If I need to search more than one, I use more than one browser tab.
Today, it happened again. I went to Terapeak to do a little research for our MultiToolShop.net site and had to start from the top. This is what my initial search page looks like:
Terapeak’s eBay Search Home Page
That’s a nice looking page and I should take a moment to point out that the Category Research and Hot Research tools are very helpful in finding and refining new niche markets in which to launch store sites. The problem with this page is what is missing: I have to search all of eBay, not just a category.
I don’t want to search all of eBay! I want to search just a category or two. It does get better! This is what the screen looks like after I click GO and it returns results:
Terapeak Results Page with Category Search
There we go! Take a look directly underneath the GO button. I can search by Category ID number, something I get from the ever-useful isoldwhat.com.
This capability existed right from the home search screen when we first signed up with Terapeak. Terapeak updated and improved the service, and as often happens when my favorite websites are “improved,” they made it worse, at least for me. They took away the ability to search by Category ID from any page! I suppose I was among several who complained about that particular change because it was changed back before too long, at least on the results pages.
As long as I do not start from the Terapeak search home and instead start from an old search results page, I can search the way I like to search: by eBay Category ID number. When a nearby tropical weather system crashes my computer and I am unable to recover an old search results page, I have to start from the top and do a search that is really just a complete waste of time. I have no intention of looking at the results page, except to add a Category ID number to it and search again.
Please, Terapeak staff, un-improve the home search screen too! Some of us are really attached to our Category ID numbers!
I really hate “new and unimproved” products and services. It’s a waste of time having to do an initial search on Terapeak and search all of eBay when I really want to search in some category 5 levels down. And because that initial search is all of eBay, it’s very slow, too. When I start the search, I go to some other tab in my browser and do other work while waiting for that search to complete.