mam98031 • Volunteer Community Member • Buyer/Seller since 1999
Hi everyone!
We'd love to keep this month's chat going a little longer. We've posted the Q&A from the live chat session below, but if you have more questions you'd like to ask regarding this month's topic, please post them here, and we'll do our best to get them answered for you.
The thread will remain open until End of day August 17th. Keep on topic as any posts that are off topic will be moved. To make it easier to follow, post 1 short question per post.
Q. Hi lucan@ebay ! Thanks for coming to the chat today.
Over a year ago, I posted this thread here in the community about sourcing insights not working in the Motors categories.
I had tagged Harry Temkin back then but since he's no longer at eBay and I never got an answer there, hopefully you can help.
I've confirmed with other sellers as recently as this week and the issues I found then appear to still be happening.
Most significantly, for any sub-category under Motors, it's showing 0 search volume and 0.0 search-to-listing ratio. This has to be a technical problem or data error - with millions of listings in some of these categories, I don't believe it's possible no one is searching for those items on eBay in the last 30 days.
Switching to Table View instead of Card View still shows 0 for search volume and search-to-listing ratio.
Table View also adds a column for Market Share. If you hover over it, a note pops up showing that Market Share is defined as "the share of the market owned by the top 10% of sellers in this category."
While I don't have hard numbers to verify, these percentages don't make sense to me - if the top 10% of sellers in a category really do own 100% of the market, what does that say for the other 90% of sellers?
Anecdotally, I've spoken to a seller who is consistently the #1 seller in one of these categories according to their Listing Quality Report and they said there is no way the market share of the top 10% is that high.
I'd be curious if you could tell us if those figures seem at all "normal" given what you may have seen across non-motors categories as well?
I'm also not sure how "average days to first sale" could be a negative number, like it's showing for brake drums.
Any idea what could be going on here and why this issue appears to be affecting the entire Motors section?
A. "Hi there! Thanks for passing this on 🙂 – based on your screenshots, it definitely looks like there are some inconsistencies, and that’s not something I would expect in relation to an entire category (in this case, Motors). I will definitely ask my team to investigate. Hopefully we can prioritize a fix relatively quickly.
I don't have any specific details on what the issue may be at the moment. Hopefully I can provide some additional information once we have a better understanding of the problem from a technical perspective."
Q. Thank you for being here, Lucan. Is there a simple "idiot's guide" to mastering Terapeak? Every time I hear the explanations, I just don't get it. Could you help break it down for the simple-minded seller that is me? Thanks in advance -- Shakurra of "MemasHeckaStuff"
A. "Hi Shakurra, this is a great question! There are a few helpful resources that I can share, here: https://www.ebay.com/sellercenter/growth/ebay-research-tools
If I had to put this into my own words, I’d say the following:
Terapeak is a search engine that provides information about sold items matching the keywords that you’re searching for.
For instance, you can search for the word “Nike” and you’ll receive information about any listing that sold within your selected date range that has the word “Nike” in the title, or item specifics.
This can produce a lot of results: some items will be for shoes, others might be for t-shirts, hats or even sporting equipment. You can select categories or filters to narrow your search results down to the specific type of Nike item you want information about.
We also summarize those sales, showing you things like “Average sold price”, “Sold price range”, “Total sellers”, and more!
Obviously some of the results will be very generic, so the quality of the information depends on how specific you get. There are also a ton of nuances to the product, and if you’re visiting for the first time, you can take our guided tour in the product to help you better understand how to use it and it’s advanced functions."
Q. I am not sure how eBay sourcing insights and product research would be helpful to specialized sellers in collectible categories. Most market insight in the Stamps category comes from publications like Linn’s Stamp News or the Scott Catalog. Past sales on eBay can be helpful for listing and pricing decisions. Unfortunately, three months is not sufficient for pricing less frequently sold items. The Stamps category market on eBay is segmented by price and condition. Low quality common stamps sell at low prices while high quality unusual or graded stamps generally sell at prices posted in the Scott US stamp values by Grade or at Scott Catalog values adjusted for grade and condition.
While eBay sale prices can be accessed, eBay search is too weak to effectively capture sale prices by catalog number. Better, more searchable data is needed. A filter on catalog number and catalog name is needed to avoid extraneous hits on hard to search items like US Scott 1 or US Scott 500. Sellers are divided about including the catalog name in titles. Search for “1” or “500” will return few actual results. Scarce catalog numbers may return motorcycle parts instead of stamps. Item specifics instantiated as filters are poorly defined or incomplete. Item specifics like “Denomination” or “Color” do not have a significant role in determining market value unless the stamp is a listed color variety. Descriptive item specifics should be unbounded. I once received a message from eBay suggesting that a red orange stamp be listed ad “orange” to increase visibility. I opted for credibility over visibility.
“Grade” relates to the appearance of the stamp, but the eBay filters use abbreviations not commonly seen in the U.S. stamp marketplace. Item specific definitions should always be phases without abbreviations. Filters should match abbreviations. “Grade” is subjective unless the stamp was graded. Since only a tiny fraction of stamps are graded, a “Grade” item specific should not be required.
“Quality” relates to gum condition of unused stamps or postal usage. Scott catalog definitions and eBay definitions conflict. Sellers who import listings from their inventory will be unlikely to modify descriptions to match eBay. Stamps are priced as “Unused never hinged”, “Unused hinged”, “Unused no gum”, and “Used”. Unfortunately, “Item Condition” values “Unused” and “Used” disappeared from eBay a few years ago.
Better, more effective, eBay Item Specifics in the Stamps category would enable better and more efficient searches and potentially more sales in addition to the ability to generate better sales data.
A. "Hi ! This is an interesting scenario that I’d like to explore a little more in-depth.
One thing that stands out to me right away is that it seems like you’ve been limited to searching the past 3 months. That’s a huge pain point that we recognize most collectible sellers experience when using eBay search results to view historic prices.
Terapeak Product Research (available at ebay.com/sh/research) allows you to search any date range up-to-and-including the past 365 days. This also allows you to view the actual sold prices of items, which isn’t always transparent on the standard eBay search results in cases where the Seller has accepted a Best Offer.
Sourcing insights also offers a full year of sales trends and can provide insights into item specific combinations that sell well within a category. It’s not always perfect, but it does depend on how frequently certain item specifics are used by other sellers.
When you search in Terapeak, always try to select a specific category to search in. Here’s an example of categories that you can select when submitting your search:
When you select a specific category, you will then be able to apply filters based on the most frequently used filters by sellers whose sold items are included in your results.
Here are some examples:
It sounds like some of the specifics used in these filters don’t always match your expectations, or the standard practices of stamp sellers/collectors.
There are likely some improvements we can make, but many of the specifics we use in these instances actually come from values that sellers have added to the listings included in the sold results. If we’re mis-identifying what kind of “grades” are used in this case, it would be helpful to connect with you in more detail about what would make sense from a stamp seller’s perspective.
However, I would also recommend looking at some of the other item specifics filters that are available. In this particular sub-category, many sellers use the “quality” item specific field to provide details on the exact quality or stamp-specific condition of the items they’re selling. You can use this in combination with the standard “condition” filter to give you a better set of filters that you can use to get very specific results.
I hope this answers some of your questions or concerns. If you’d like more information, please reach out to your customer support representative – I’d love to set up a brief 1:1 meeting to learn more about this specific category and how we can make our products more useful to sellers like you."
Q. The wording of the "No active results found for 'Does Not Apply Unbranded Black'" message suggests that it's searching listing titles for that phrase, rather than Item Specifics.
A. "Hi Terapeak Product Research searches across both the title and item specific using the keyword search that you entered.
In this particular scenario, it looks like results from Sourcing Insights relating to eBay Motors-related sub-categories are not picking up all of the data that we use to populate item specifics recommendations, which is likely why we don't see any results in the data set on Product Research. This is a bug that we will prioritize, and hopefully we'll have more information soon."
Elizabeth,
@valueaddedresource wrote:
Thanks for keeping the conversation going elizabeth@ebay !
Just some feedback and a suggestion for future chats - if the goal is to allow for the conversation to continue after the chat, I'd suggest just unlocking the chat thread for a few days and maybe making an "end of chat" post that makes it clear the "live" portion with the featured specialist has ended but the community team will do their best to get answers/follow up.
As your intro comment on this thread suggests, one post per question makes things easier. I agree with that logic and honestly I think keeping the discussion going where the original questions were all in individual posts is much easier to read and keep track of what was already said than the copying and pasting of the Q & A in your original post here.
Thanks to lucan@ebay for taking the time to chat with us and hopefully we'll get an update from the team once they figure out what is going on with those inconsistencies. 👍
Thank you @valueaddedresource for this feedback, and I'll definitely share it with the whole team. Keeping the chat open, isn't something that is planned for future Monthly Chat's, but if we do, this is great insight and something to consider.
Thanks again for asking some great questions during the chat!
Elizabeth,
