Terapeak has been hurting eBay sellers for over a year and eBay continues to ignores it.

[timemachine777]

For over a year now, eBay's partner Terapeak, has been using sellers photos and listing information to create fake listing pages to get affiliate fees from eBay. I've walked several reps from eBay's trust and safety dept through the process, and even though they admit that it's a major issue, they also state that their hands are tied due to the partnership between the two companies.

Terapeak is not only hurting sellers, but they are giving eBay a blackeye. What Terapeak does is, scrap the accounts of sellers on eBay, even if the sellers are not, nor have ever been subscribed to the Terapeak listing analytics application on eBay (Like myself). They take sellers Listing Titles, photos, and contents, and attach it all to a fake Buy it now page on their website.

Here's how Terapeak hurts sellers, and eBay...

Terapeak submits all these fake listings to Google and other search engines. Once someone does a search on Google via a general search or images search, an eBay sellers listing appears as a Terapeak listing instead of an eBay listing. The searcher clicks the link or photo and goes to the Terapeak web site and sees the listing as a Terapeak listing with a BIN button an everything.

As a searcher, you would believe that the item you are currently looking at is listed on Terapeak in many cases and for sale. What you don't know is that Terapeak is not a selling venue, and that the listing is a fake purchase page. So, you read all the info and you decide to purchase the item. So you pull the trigger and click the BIN button. So...what happens next?

Now you get redirected or sent to eBay as intended, and either land on an item that someone else is selling that could be unrelated to the item viewed on Terapeak, or you end up on a weird looking eBay search page, or better yet an eBay sold item listing. All of these just wasted the searchers time and made many of them believe in some cases that eBay just Hi-jacked their browser and redirected them from The fake Terapeak selling venue to eBay's selling venue. Not a happy buyer.

How does this hurt sellers? Terapeak is able to get top placement over eBay on Google search a lot of the times, which means that if Terapeak has scraped your eBay account, then instead of your listings showing up on Google with a direct link to your listing page, it is instead showing up as a fake Terapeak listings that is linked to other pages on eBay, and rarely your listing. This means that your listings data, photos, etc are being used as bait to lure searchers/buyers to Terapeaks website, so that Terapeak can make money off of it.

This also means that the buyer that thought they were in the process of buying your item, couldn't really buy it. Now they are just hitting the back button, and trying again with no success, or head back to Google to finish looking at the rest of their search results. Also, sellers can't do anything about it because eBay protects Terapeak in their User agreement.

Sellers should all to searchers on Google for their listings on eBay, to find out how many are attached to Terapeak and recreate the listing(s) from scratch and revising them doesn't help. Also sellers need to do repeated searches of their recreated listings as Terapeak will do new data scraping. They just took the photo of my bread peel that I listed a few days ago and attached it a listing of my bread peel that I sold on eBay in Jan. 

Here are a couple of examples of fake Terapeak BIN pages for butter molds that I just searched today, and the redirect pages. These ones actually tell you that they are items on eBay, unlike some of the other fake BIN pages that I noted above.

1.

https://www.terapeak.com/worth/antique-dutch-hand-carved-wood-butter-mold-springerle-cookie-press-pr...

Redirect page:

http://www.ebay.com/itm/362040297927?rmvSB=true

2.

https://www.terapeak.com/worth/vintage-early-1900-s-antique-wood-wooden-rectangular-1-lb-box-butter-...

Redirect page:

https://www.ebay.com/sch/items/?_nkw=Vintage+Early+1900%27s+Antique+Wood%2Fwooden+Rectangular+1+Lb.+...

Post your results so readers can see the redirects that you get. Also contact eBay's Trust and Safety dept if you want to get this eventually stopped, as the more sellers that protest this practice between Terapeak and eBay, may result in something being done by eBay.

[odditiesandantiquities1]

Good grief. I had no idea that was going on. And eBay allows it? It looks so darn fraudulent. If I were the would be purchaser, I'd be majorly ticked off.

[ymeagainlord]

I found one that shows on Terapeak as $35 but when you hit the buy now it takes you to that listing on eBay - for $55

[coolections]

It looks to me it is helping Ebay. It shows $125 but you can get it cheaper for $85 on Ebay. Love It !!!!

[timemachine777]

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@odditiesandantiquities1 wrote:

Good grief. I had no idea that was going on. And eBay allows it? It looks so darn fraudulent. If I were the would be purchaser, I'd be majorly ticked off.

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It's all about making click fees, and commissions if possible. 

[timemachine777]

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@ymeagainlord wrote:
I found one that shows on Terapeak as $35 but when you hit the buy now it takes you to that listing on eBay - for $55

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I hadn't seen that type yet. Was the higher priced listing an older one from that seller?

[goodluckselling]

I thought we went through this a few months back with you?  Terapeaks is an approved affiliate partner with eBay as are hundreds of other companies that all have web-site just like terapeaks does. 

I doubt any CS person you spoke with had any concerns especially if they were smart enough to know how this all works.

Conspiracy creating must be inactive right now because this thread reminds me of this one you started a few months back.

http://community.ebay.com/t5/Selling/Terapeak-is-hi-jacking-your-photos-amp-titles-on-Google-images/...

Please stop with the conspiracies as none of them seem to pan out for you, and you are spending  IMO far to much time away from your real business to deal with rehashing the same ole conspiracies over and over with a new thread title.

Good Luck!

Good Luck Selling!

[timemachine777]

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@goodluckselling wrote:

I thought we went through this a few months back with you?  Terapeaks is an approved affiliate partner with eBay as are hundreds of other companies that all have web-site just like terapeaks does. 

I doubt any CS person you spoke with had any concerns especially if they were smart enough to know how this all works.

Conspiracy creating must be inactive right now because this thread reminds me of this one you started a few months back.

http://community.ebay.com/t5/Selling/Terapeak-is-hi-jacking-your-photos-amp-titles-on-Google-images/...

Please stop with the conspiracies as none of them seem to pan out for you, and you are spending  IMO far to much time away from your real business to deal with rehashing the same ole conspiracies over and over with a new thread title.

Good Luck!

Good Luck Selling!

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The facts are in the search results that searchers do. My thread has to do with fact and not fiction. Searchers can put my claims to the test for themselves. Just because the Company eBay is OK with it, doesn't make it right. It also shows where eBay stands when it comes to their buying and selling members.

An eBay is no better, as I just did a search for my bread peel earlier today and my eBay listing photo is not linked by eBay to my listing, but instead to a general search page. 

My Photo:

https://www.google.com/imgres?imgurl=https%3A%2F%2Fi.ebayimg.com%2Fthumbs%2Fimages%2Fg%2FTFcAAOSwbl5...

Redirect page:

https://www.ebay.com/sch/Wrought-Iron-Antiquities/1217/bn_55194584/i.html?_fsrp=1

You can't spin this as something good for sellers or buyers. It's a waste of searchers time, and sellers listings. This is one of the major reasons that searchers are getting so sick of searching for stuff on line. eBay will hit sellers with violations for using spamming tactics to redirect traffic to their listings, while eBay both does it themselves and allows their partners to do it. You may be OK with it but most searchers are not.

[siayan]

I do a lot of searches and have learned to skip over many including terepeak, askart, worthpoint, wiki, and many others. I am not the sharpest pencil in the lot so I think many others have figured it out. 

But thanks for bringing it to the eBay reps attention. Have you tried the Philippines CS?

[tunicaslot]

I've checked a few listings on both of my other accts - when I click BIN - it takes me to the item page for a buyer to purchase. I'm not seeing a problem at least with my listings.

[timemachine777]

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@tunicaslot wrote:

I've checked a few listings on both of my other accts - when I click BIN - it takes me to the item page for a buyer to purchase. I'm not seeing a problem at least with my listings.

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Do your listings on Google have a Terapeak.com address attached to them or an eBay.com?

[odditiesandantiquities1]

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@coolections wrote:

It looks to me it is helping Ebay. It shows $125 but you can get it cheaper for $85 on Ebay. Love It !!!!

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Unfortunately they aren't all the same things.

[ymeagainlord]

• Well the Terapeak does say "original listed at" the $35.

I always thought Terapeak was supposed to be just a "tell you what it's worth" comparison type service?

[tunicaslot]

Most had the Terapeak - only a couple I checked had the Ebay. Not saying it's not happening to some - but at this point I don't see a problem on my accts.

[timemachine777]

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@tunicaslot wrote:

Most had the Terapeak - only a couple I checked had the Ebay. Not saying it's not happening to some - but at this point I don't see a problem on my accts.

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Pretty much, every listing that I click on, on Google with a Terapeak address, eventually takes me to a different item, regardless of who the seller is. Only those searchers that have dealt with this issue several times will know too avoid a photo with a Terapeak address tag. Which creates another issue. When they see the same photos a couple of times in Google images, they will avoid all the images that are the same even though one image may have an eBay tag an go right to the correct listing for sale.