Online retail giant eBay has announced plans to acquire Terapeak, an online platform that helps eBay, Amazon, and Shopify sellers grow their online sales. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.
Founded out of Toronto, Canada, in 2002, Terapeak leverages data around supply, demand, and pricing to arm merchants with the right information to sell their goods. For example, sellers can know in advance what kinds of products are selling well, the optimum prices to charge, and what kinds of things the competition is doing.
Above: Terapeak: Dashboard
Aside from a free trial period, Terapeak offers three core pricing tiers: $ 12 / month “Research” plan which includes access to years worth of sales data and price trends for millions of goods; the $ 10 / month “MySales Pro” which has more limited access to sales data; and the $ 3.58 / month “SEO Pro” plan which is more about optimizing your products for search engines.
Terapeak customers are able to connect all of their eBay, Shopify, and Amazon seller accounts and track sales through a single dashboard. This also enables access to compare the performance of products and categories across marketplaces, thereby highlighting what’s working and what’s not.
eBay and Terapeak have actually had a data partnership in place since 2004, and the duo announced an extension to this agreement last November, so today’s news may not come as a complete surprise.
What next
Once the deal is concluded, eBay said it plans to “begin integrating certain functionality from Terapeak” into the eBay Seller Hub, which is where eBay merchants can access myriad sales and inventory data relating to their accounts.
There is no word on whether this spells the end for Terapeak’s functionality with Amazon and Shopify, but as two major rivals, it’s hard to imagine eBay maintaining integrations with any other ecommerce platform.
“Nearly two million sellers currently manage their eBay business on Seller Hub,” noted Bob Kupbens, vice president of B2C selling at eBay, in a press release. “Expanding Seller Hub to provide additional capabilities from Terapeak will help our sellers be even more successful and enable them to more effectively manage their businesses on eBay. “We are committed to being the best partner to our sellers as we look to create the most powerful selling platform. The integration of Terapeak’s functionalities into Seller Hub – from sales history and performance enhancement opportunities to price guidance and comparisons – will continue to help eBay’s merchants scale their businesses on eBay.”
While terms of the deal were not disclosed, it seems that Terapeak had raised only CAD$ 5 million (USD$ 3.9 million) in equity funding, so this deal is unlikely to be a bank-busting acquisition. eBay said that it expects the transaction to close before the end of 2017, after which all Terapeak employees will join eBay, though the Terapeak team will mostly still be based out of Toronto.
