eBay To Acquire Toronto-Based Terapeak
Ebay has announced plans to acquire the Toronto-based Terapeak.
Originally founded in Victoria, Terapeak has worked with eBay in analytics for a few years, making the acquisition a natural move for the e-commerce company. Terapeak uses supply, demand and pricing data to help merchants know what to sell, when to sell it and what kind of return they may be able to get for products on marketplaces like eBay.
Once the transaction closes, eBay will begin to integrate Terapeak into their Sellers Hub. The hub helps merchants run their business and increase sales by offering sales totals, listing guidance and marketing. Prior to this, eBay users could download Terapeak through the eBay’s apps centre, where the app touted that Terapeak users increased profit by an average of 65 per cent per sale.
“eBay’s planned acquisition of Terapeak makes so much sense for everyone involved, particularly for our customers,” said Kevin North, president and CEO of Terapeak. “We are excited to continue our vision of empowering merchants to discover what to sell on eBay and how to optimize their listings for maximum performance.”
The integration with the Sellers Hub allows Terapeak to align with the other insights eBay offers, providing a complete experience for professional sellers on the site. It will also make the experience more user-friendly, leading to more overall merchants taking advantage of the platform and analytics.
“Nearly two million sellers currently manage their eBay business on Seller Hub. 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,” said Bob Kupbens, VP of B2C Selling at eBay. “We are committed to being the best partner to our sellers as we look to create the most powerful selling platform.”
Terapeak has seen a lot of growth over the past years. In early 2014 the platform had very little penetration, but began to offer its MySales service to users for free. That ended up growing their user base to over 300,000 within 18 months, including 27,000 premium subscribers. Right now over 2.6 million people use the platform.
Recently, Terapeak introduced a sales prediction tool for Shopify users looking to list a product on eBay. Terapeak also has the capability to support Amazon sellers on their platform, but there is no indication whether the eBay acquisition will shut down support for other e-commerce sites, considering they are major competitors to eBay. Overall Terapeak analyzes more than $75 billion in gross merchandise volume.
The transition is expected to be completed before the end of 2017, and Terapeak’s employees will begin to report to eBay executives. They will not have to relocate and will continue to operate out of Victoria and Toronto.
Terapeak picked up a $4 million Series A back in 2010 and managed to grow with just $5 million in total funding. Financial terms of the acquisition by eBay were not disclosed.
