07/12/2017
eBay acquires Terapeak
eBay has continued expanding their portfolio by buying a Canadian marketplaces analytics company Terapeak. The deal is to be finished by the end of 2017, and after the transfer, Terapeak will remain in Canada where they have established themselves as one of the leading companies dealing with marketplace analytics for eBay and for its biggest competitor Amazon.
Kevin North who is a CEO and President of Terapeak says that this move is absolutely sensible and logical, and that it will reap benefits for all sides involved, but most importantly – for their customers. He claims that the Terapeak is focused on continuing with their policies of improving the product and empowering the merchants using it to discover what products to sell and what strategies to apply to their listings in order to maximize their performance.
According to him, the core features of Terapeak will be gradually integrated into the Sellers Hub, making this tool more robust and more efficient. The final goal is to make the Sellers hub a tool that will allow merchants to run and manage their online operations from a single place.
The newly acquired Terapeak unit will be under the direct management of the VP of Business Selling Bob Kupbens. He says that the newest acquisition will empower over 2 million merchants using the Sellers hub at the moment to run their businesses more effectively, as the advanced analytics that were part of the Terapeak will be now available under the Sellers hub and that this addition will allow them to run everything from a single spot without any need to use any kind of external services in the future.
It is symptomatic that the eBay decided to cut certain segments of Terapeak before the merger, and that had the gravest effects on competition analysis feature. It is yet to be seen whether these features will be restored once the product is fully integrated into the Sellers Hub, as this segment has been considered as one of the weakest points of eBay. In general, this move suggests that the eBay realised that their weakest point is the marketplace intelligence and that they are ready to make significant moves in that direction.