eBay Research: Terapeak versus Hammertap

If you sell products on eBay as your home-based business, you probably know the value of good research. And while you can do eBay research manually, it's painfully time consuming (as are many things done manually). Fortunately, there are software tools available that vastly speed up and aggregate eBay research data.

Two of the leading eBay research tools are Terapeak and HammerTap (formerly known as Deep Analysis). Both are very good tools and will present you with a vast amount of insight into a product's performance (or lack thereof) on eBay. These tools work by tapping into eBay's proprietary listing data for closed listings. You type or paste in your keyword, click a button, and the research tools will return a set of performance statistics to you.

Each one of these tools provides a huge amount of data that can help you determine winning products to choose for sale on eBay. I would not 'thumbs down' either of these products; they both do a wonderful job and I won't bother to go into all their features here.

But there is one point that makes me prefer Terapeak. (By the way, if you ask 10 different eBay sellers what their favorite research tool is, you might get 10 different answers).

The biggest advantage Terapeak has had over HammerTap is that it is web-based. HammerTap is a PC based software tool (it will not run on Mac, Linux, or other non-Windows platforms). This is fine if you have a PC and stay at one place to do your research. However, I find myself initiating research projects at a variety of computers besides my main home business computer. With Terapeak, I simply go to their website and log in. No software to install, just fire up the browser.

Having said that, I just spoke with the HammerTap people this morning and they are getting ready to roll out their product as a web-based tool alongside their PC software to solve this 'standalone' problem. The rep I talked to didn't say if they were planning to eventually retire the desktop version because their web based version is brand new.

Costs?

At the current time, Terapeak has two plans, Insight for $14.95 per month and Advantage for $24.95 per month. You can purchase the Advantage plan with an annual payment of $197.95 which brings down the per month to $16.50. You can compare the two plans at their comparison page (link here). The biggest difference between the two plans is the number of months data you tap into although there are other differences as well.

HammerTap is a comparable value at $19.95 per month. As recently as a few months ago, they were $24.95 per month so it appears as though these two companies are duking it out! Along with the HammerTap subscription you get a few cool tools too. In addition to the HammerTap access, you get an eBay fee calculator tool and a bad bidder blocking tool. Some product features can be viewed on their Product List Page (link here).

Bottom line, you simply can't go wrong with either of these products. I tend to still favor Terapeak due to the fact it has been a web-based tool all along and is therefore mature in that respect. But I may look again at HammerTap in a few months after their web-based tool has had a chance to settle in. And if you're looking for eBay research strategies and how to put either of these tools to work, check out the Guerrilla eBay Research System (link here).

Tags: eBay Research, Terapeak eBay Research, HammerTap eBay Research, eBay Market Research