Using Terapeak to Find The Best Time of Day to Sell on eBay
Recently I have been playing with some eBay research software called terapeak. It is essentially a data mining tool that eBay sellers (or buyers) can use to look at groups of data that might help them sell more product (or buy cheaper).
Recently I have been using it to do some analysis of auction end times and average selling prices by hour of day.
Terapeak is one of those products that can really shortcut a lot of manual labour. For example, it took me about 10 minutes to run some queries using its easy search interface to look at eBay auction finishing times in one of my categories. I found some interesting data!
Different types of queries can be run including things like
- Top sellers
- Category Sales
- Popular products
- Hot trends
- and more
All the searches start out with search terms (like “golf club”) and you can refine from there using filters, such as
- Seller ID
- Auction Type
- Categories
- Price Ranges
- Time of Day
I was able to look at data over the last month and compare my own average selling price by time of day to others in the same selling space, selling similar items. I could then identify the best times of the day to sell on eBay. For a larger group of sample data I also compared the popular and most profitable eBay auction end times with the relevant eBay.com categories. They were pretty similar.
It is interesting because there were a few finds that I didn’t expect. For one range of products I was sure that lunchtimes (say 12-1pm) and dinner times (5-6pm) would be worse, but for some of my products they were actually two of the best times to sell!
So now I can go back to my listing schedules and alter my schedule times. I will see how it goes, but the data can’t really lie.
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I find the products Auctionintelligence (http://www.certes.net/auctionintelligence) and eSellerStreet - http://www.esellerstreet.com to be very useful