What Is Terapeak on eBay? The UK Product Research Guide (2026)

Every sourcing decision on eBay boils down to two questions: will this sell, and at what price? Guessing is expensive, and asking mates in a Facebook group is worse. Terapeak answers both questions with eBay’s own sales history, which makes it the first tool a UK seller should open before spending a penny on stock.

This guide covers what Terapeak is, exactly where it lives on ebay.co.uk, every metric it reports, how to run searches that return usable answers, and a worked example in pounds and pence. It also covers what Terapeak cannot do, because the tool tells you what the market pays, not what you personally keep after eBay’s selling fees, postage and stock costs. Everything factual here is drawn from eBay’s official Product research help page and its Seller Hub documentation, so you’re not relying on folklore.

Terapeak is eBay’s built-in product research suite. It started life as an independent analytics company that sold eBay market data on subscription; eBay acquired Terapeak in 2017 and folded it into Seller Hub, where it now runs as two tools:

• Terapeak product research (eBay’s help pages call it simply “Product research”): search up to 3 years of real eBay sold data by keyword, product or category, across eBay’s marketplaces. This is the part everyone means when they say “Terapeak”, and it’s included with Seller Hub.
• Terapeak sourcing insights: a category-level view of demand versus supply, aimed at deciding what to stock next. eBay makes this one available to business sellers with an eBay Shop subscription, at no extra cost on top of the Shop fee.

The crucial difference from browsing eBay’s public search: Terapeak works from completed sales data, not asking prices. Any hopeful can list a Wedgwood teapot at £80; Terapeak tells you the ones that actually sold went for £24 to £38 and that two thirds of them never sold at all. Asking prices flatter; sold prices tell the truth.

Terapeak has no separate website or app any more; it lives inside Seller Hub on ebay.co.uk. To open it:

1. Sign in to eBay and open Seller Hub (from My eBay, choose Selling, or go to Seller Hub directly). Seller Hub is free to use.
2. Select the Research tab in the Seller Hub navigation. eBay describes this tab as the home of advice for “improving your listings, sourcing, pricing, and restocking”.
3. Choose Terapeak product research, type a keyword or product identifier into the search box, and run your first search.

One catch worth knowing before you go looking: eBay’s Seller Hub help page says you need to have had at least one sale to use Seller Hub. If you’re brand new and the Research tab won’t appear, that’s usually why: sell one item (even something from the loft) and the door opens.

A Terapeak search returns a research dashboard built from the last 3 years of eBay sales data for millions of items. Per eBay’s help page, the core metrics are:

• Sales trends: how sold volumes and prices move over your chosen date range, which is how you spot seasonality and dying fads.
• Average sold price: the mean price items matching your search actually sold for, including sales where a Best Offer was accepted (something public eBay search hides).
• Sold price range: the spread between the cheapest and dearest sales, which tells you how much condition, bundling and listing quality move the price.
• Average postage costs and the share of free-postage listings: what buyers in this niche expect to pay for delivery.
• Sell-through rate: the balance between listings and sales, available for searches covering items sold within the last 90 days. More on this below, because it’s the single most useful number in the tool.
• Total number of sellers who sold the item: your competition, counted.
• Selling format: whether the item moves via auction or fixed price, so you list the way the market actually buys.

Long before Terapeak, sellers checked sold prices with eBay’s Advanced Search: enter keywords, tick Completed listings, search. That still works, and for a 30-second sanity check it’s fine. But eBay itself documents four ways Product research beats it:

Terapeak rewards specific searches and punishes vague ones, because a listing or sale must exactly match your keywords and parameters to be counted. “Nike trainers” will average together £15 kids’ velcro shoes and £200 collector Dunks and tell you nothing. Here’s the routine that works:

1. Search the exact product, not the niche. Include the brand, model and key spec, e.g. lego creator 10281 rather than lego bonsai. If the product has a barcode or part number, use the identifier filters instead: Terapeak can filter by MPN, EAN, UPC, ISBN or ePID, which removes keyword ambiguity entirely. (Not sure which code is which? See our guide to MPNs, EANs and eBay product identifiers.)
2. Cut the noise with exclusions. Put a minus sign (or “AND NOT”) before any word you want excluded: iphone 13 128gb -cracked -spares -case strips out damaged phones and accessories that would drag your average down.
3. Combine variants with OR. A search like iphone 13 AND (128GB OR 256GB) returns listings with either capacity in the title, handy when two variants sell for near-identical money.
4. Set the date range to match the question. Ranges run from a single day up to 3 years. Use 90 days for “what’s it worth right now” (and to get the sell-through rate), and 1 to 3 years for “is this seasonal or declining”.
5. Filter to your market. Apply Category, then the dynamic filters it unlocks (Condition, Model, Colour and so on), plus buyer and seller location and marketplace. For most UK sourcing decisions, filter to UK seller location: a used DVD sells for different money on ebay.com than on ebay.co.uk.
6. Sanity-check the underlying listings. Click into a few actual sales and confirm they really are your item in your condition. One anomalous bundle can distort a small sample’s average. Note that only listings that are active or sold within the previous 90 days open when clicked; older or removed listings still count in the numbers but can’t be viewed.

Sell-through rate (STR) is the ratio of items sold to items listed for your search, expressed as a percentage. Terapeak calculates it for searches covering items sold within the last 90 days. It is the closest thing eBay gives you to a demand gauge:

• High STR (roughly 60%+ as a rule of thumb): demand outruns supply. Stock moves fast; you can price with confidence and expect a quick turn.
• Mid STR (roughly 30 to 60%): a normal, competitive market. Your listing quality, price and photos decide whether you’re in the sold half or the unsold half.
• Low STR (under roughly 30%): supply swamps demand. Expect slow sales, relisting cycles and price pressure. Only source at this level if your margin is fat enough to pay for the wait.

Those bands are seller convention, not an eBay rule, and sensible thresholds genuinely differ by category: 25% might be healthy for niche car parts where every part number is rare, and terrible for phone cases. Always compare an item’s STR against similar items in the same category rather than against a universal number.

STR also pairs with seller count. An 80% STR with 6 sellers is a quiet goldmine; an 80% STR with 900 sellers is a commodity knife-fight where the price will race to the bottom before your stock arrives. Read the two numbers together, never alone.

Here’s the repeatable routine for evaluating any potential buy, whether it’s a car boot find, a retail clearance deal or a wholesale pallet:

1. Pin down the exact product. Search by identifier (EAN or MPN) where possible, filtered to your condition and UK sellers.
2. Read the last 90 days. Note the average sold price, the sold price range and the sell-through rate. The bottom of the sold range is your realistic worst case; source against that, not the average.
3. Zoom out to 1 to 3 years. Is the trend line flat, seasonal or falling? Board games peak into December; garden furniture peaks in spring. Buying a seasonal item at its price peak is how resellers end up storing stock for nine months.
4. Count the competition and postage norms. Seller count tells you how crowded the market is. The free-postage share and average postage cost tell you whether buyers here expect delivery baked into the price, which matters when a Royal Mail or Evri label is eating £2.50 to £4 of every sale.
5. Run the fee maths before you buy. Take the realistic sold price, subtract eBay fees, the postage label, packaging and the buy cost, and see what’s left. Our free eBay fee calculator does this in ten seconds. If the margin only works at the top of the sold range, it doesn’t work.

Say you’re a UK business seller offered a job lot of a retired LEGO set at £18 per unit, and Terapeak (filtered to new condition, UK sellers, last 90 days) shows an average sold price of £39.99, a sold range of £24 to £52 and a 62% sell-through rate. Strong demand signal. Now the part Terapeak doesn’t do, using eBay’s current published business-seller rates for the Toys & Games category:

• Sale: £39.99 item + £3.95 postage charged to the buyer = £43.94 total. eBay’s final value fee applies to the whole amount, postage included.
• Final value fee (Toys & Games, 10.9%): £4.79, plus the £0.40 per-order fee for orders over £10.
• Regulatory operating fee (0.35%): £0.15.
• Total eBay fees: £5.34.
• Postage label: say £3.39 for a Royal Mail Tracked 48 small parcel (your actual rate depends on size, weight and any discounts).
• Stock cost: £18.00.

Net result: £43.94 − £5.34 − £3.39 − £18.00 = £17.21 profit per unit, about 39% of the total sale. At the bottom of the sold range (£24 + £3.95 postage, fees of roughly £3.55) the same maths leaves barely £3 before packaging, so the deal lives or dies on how confident you are of selling near the average. That, in one example, is why the sold range matters more than the sold average.

Product research answers “how does this item perform?”. Sourcing insights flips the question to “what should I stock next?”. Per eBay’s help page, it lets Shop sellers:

• Spot out-of-stock opportunities: it surfaces sold single-stock listings so you can see what’s in or out of stock across the market and step in with a competitive offer where supply has dried up.
• Research by category: find categories with high buyer demand but low inventory currently listed on eBay, which is where new stock earns the easiest money.

Sourcing insights comes at no extra cost with a business eBay Shop subscription (every Shop tier includes it; Basic starts at £27 a month on eBay’s current price list). If you’re a private seller or a business without a Shop, you keep Product research but not Sourcing insights. On its own it’s rarely a reason to buy a Shop, but if the free-listing allowance already justifies the subscription, it’s a genuinely useful bonus.

Terapeak is the best free view of eBay’s market data you’ll get, because it’s built on eBay’s own numbers. It still has real limits worth knowing before you bet stock money on it:

• It shows revenue, not profit. Average sold price says nothing about fees, postage, packaging, returns or what the stock cost. Two sellers can sell the same item at the same price and one loses money.
• It describes the past, not the future. Three years of history is superb for seasonality, useless for a licensed product whose hype dies next month. Trends lag turning points by definition.
• Sell-through rate only covers recent sales. The STR figure is available for searches of items sold in the last 90 days, so you can’t compute a clean STR for last Christmas.
• Exact matching cuts both ways. Great for precision, but misspelt or oddly-titled listings that would still compete with yours simply don’t appear in your results.
• Old listings can’t be inspected. Sales older than 90 days (or removed listings) count in the aggregates but often can’t be opened, so you can’t always verify what an outlier actually was.
• It’s eBay-only. No Vinted, Amazon, Etsy or Depop data. Fine for eBay sourcing decisions; blind to everything else.
• Averages hide bad listings. The average includes sellers with poor photos and one-line descriptions. You can beat the average; a lazy listing will undershoot it.

A question we get asked directly: is DashVue a Terapeak alternative? No, and it’s worth being straight about it, because the two tools do different jobs and work best together.

Terapeak looks outward at the market. It aggregates every seller’s sold listings to tell you what to source and roughly what it’ll fetch. DashVue looks inward at your account. It connects to your eBay sales and shows what each item actually netted after every fee: final value fee, per-order fee, regulatory fee, postage label, promoted listings charges, refunds, the lot, in proper profit-and-loss reports rather than a payouts-minus-guesswork spreadsheet.

The workflow that actually compounds: use Terapeak before you buy, to validate demand and price. Use DashVue after you sell, to check the margin you modelled is the margin you got, and to spot the products where fees and postage quietly ate the spread. The sellers who grow are the ones who close that loop; the £17.21 in the worked example above only counts if it survives contact with reality.

Terapeak product research comes at no extra charge as part of Seller Hub, which is itself free to use. The exception is Terapeak sourcing insights, which requires a business eBay Shop subscription (it’s then included in the Shop fee at no extra cost).

Check you’re in Seller Hub (not the old My eBay selling view) and look under the Research tab. If Seller Hub itself won’t load, remember eBay requires at least one completed sale before you can use it. On the eBay app, research options are more limited, so use a desktop browser for serious sourcing sessions.

Up to 3 years, and you can set any date range within that, from a single day upwards. That’s the headline advantage over eBay’s completed listings search, which only covers the previous 90 days.

No. Terapeak reports market-level sold prices and averages. It has no idea what you paid for stock, what your postage labels cost, or what eBay charged you in fees on a given sale, so it cannot calculate profit. For that you need the maths in the worked example above, a fee calculator before you buy, and profit-tracking software like DashVue on your actual sales.

Product research is item-level: search a product and see its sold history, prices and sell-through. Sourcing insights is category-level: it highlights where demand is high and listed supply is low, and surfaces out-of-stock opportunities, to guide what you stock next. Product research comes with Seller Hub; Sourcing insights needs a business Shop subscription.

The underlying data is eBay’s own transaction records, including real Best Offer accepted prices, so it’s as close to ground truth as eBay research gets. Inaccuracy creeps in from how you search: mixed conditions, missing exclusions or a vague keyword will produce a precise-looking average of the wrong things. Filter tightly and spot-check individual sold listings before trusting a number.

• eBay UK Help: Product research covering the metrics reported, the 3-year data window, filters and search logic, Sourcing insights eligibility, and the differences vs completed listings.
• eBay UK Help: Seller Hub covering the Research tab, Seller Hub being free, and the one-sale requirement.
• eBay UK Help: Fees for business sellers covering final value fee mechanics, category rates, per-order fee, regulatory operating fee, Shop pricing.
• eBay UK Help: Fees for private sellers covering free selling for UK private sellers and the 300 free monthly listings.

eBay’s tools, fee rates and eligibility rules change over time. Figures here reflect eBay’s published UK help pages as checked in July 2026; always confirm current rates against eBay’s official pages before committing to stock.