What Terapeak Shows, Which eBay Store Tier Includes It Free, and What It Costs Otherwise
Terapeak is free. The part of it that most sellers mean when they say the word costs nothing at all, and the part that does cost something is not the part most people are asking about.
eBay splits the tool in two, and it no longer uses the Terapeak name for either half.
The two tools and who gets them
eBay's help article, checked 5 August 2026, is titled Product research, not Terapeak. It draws the line clearly.
Product research is available to any seller with access to Seller Hub. There is no subscription requirement and no separate charge.
Sourcing insights is different. eBay's wording is that it is "available at no extra cost to business sellers with a Basic Store subscription or above."
That phrase is doing quiet work. No extra cost does not mean free. It means bundled into a subscription you are already paying for, which makes the Store fee the actual price of admission.
What Sourcing insights really costs
Because access runs through the Store subscription, the honest price is the tier price.
In the United States, a Basic Store costs 27.95 dollars a month on monthly renewal, or 21.95 dollars a month if you renew annually, verified against eBay's fee pages on 25 July 2026. Everything above Basic also qualifies: Premium at 74.95 or 59.95, Anchor at 349.95 or 299.95, and Enterprise on annual terms only.
Two things follow that are easy to get wrong.
First, tier names are not universal. The United Kingdom runs Basic, Featured and Anchor tiers on its Business Shop, priced in pounds and quoted before VAT. Germany uses Basis, Top, Premium and Platin. Australia does not use Stores at all for this purpose; it runs eBay Pro plans instead. If you sell outside the US, the entry tier that unlocks Sourcing insights is not called Basic and does not cost 27.95 of anything.
Second, nobody should buy a Store subscription for Sourcing insights alone. A Store pays for itself through insertion fee allowances and final value fee treatment long before a research tool enters the calculation. Our store subscription comparison across seven markets sets out what each tier costs and what it includes.
What Product research gives you for nothing
The free half is not a trial version. eBay lists what it returns:
- Sales trends over the selected period
- Average sales price
- Sold price range
- Average shipping costs, plus how many listings offered free shipping
- Sell-through rate, for searches covering items sold within the last 90 days
- Total number of sellers who have sold that item
- The selling format items sold in
Coverage is the last three years of eBay sales data. You can filter to any range inside that window, from one day upward.
Why it beats the completed listings search
Sellers often assume the free completed listings filter does the same job. eBay itself lists four differences, and they are substantial.
Completed listings reaches back 90 days. Product research reaches back three years.
Product research shows the price an item actually sold for even when a Best Offer was accepted. Completed listings does not, which means every negotiated sale in that view is misleading you upward.
Product research calculates metrics rather than just listing sales: average sold price, average shipping, seller count, sell-through rate, trend direction.
And it matches searches strictly. Completed listings pads thin results with related items, which quietly inflates whatever conclusion you were drawing.
That third point about Best Offer is the one that costs sellers money. If you price from completed listings in a category where offers are common, you are pricing off a number nobody paid.
Filters worth knowing
The search accepts identifier filters on MPN, UPC, EPID, EAN and ISBN, plus sale price range, listing format, item condition, buyer and seller location, and marketplace.
It also takes search logic. Multiple words are treated as all required. A minus sign or the words AND NOT exclude a term, so iPhone XS Max 64GB -cover drops accessory listings that would otherwise drag your average price down. Brackets with OR let you group variants in one query.
Excluding accessories is the single highest-value habit here. In most electronics and collectables categories, cases and spares outnumber the actual item and destroy the average.
Team access works with Product research, so you can delegate research to someone without sharing account credentials.
Reading the metrics without fooling yourself
The numbers are only as good as the search that produced them, and three of them are routinely misread.
Sell-through rate is the most useful figure and the most limited. eBay calculates it only for searches covering items sold within the last 90 days. Widen your date range to three years and the metric stops being meaningful for that search, because the listing population it would divide by is not the population that existed then.
Average sold price is an average, which means a handful of unusual sales move it. In categories where the same search returns both a bare item and a bundled lot, the average describes neither. Tighten the search until the results are genuinely comparable before trusting the number.
Seller count answers a question sellers rarely ask but should: how concentrated is this item. Twenty sales spread across eighteen sellers is a different market from twenty sales across two sellers, and the second is far harder to enter even though the demand figure looks identical.
Average shipping cost and the count of listings offering free shipping tell you what buyers in that category expect. If most competing listings ship free, pricing your item lower with paid postage usually loses, because buyers compare delivered totals rather than item prices.
From sold price to actual profit
Product research tells you what an item sold for. It does not tell you what the seller kept.
That gap is the whole game. A sold price of 60 dollars is not 60 dollars of revenue once the final value fee, the per-order fee, and any category-specific treatment come out. In lower-priced categories the gap between headline price and net proceeds routinely decides whether an item is worth sourcing at all.
Take an average sold price from Product research, put it through the fee calculator, and you get the number that actually matters. Our itemized guide to every eBay fee explains each deduction and why category matters more than most sellers expect.
When the free tool is not enough
Product research answers questions about specific items. It does not answer questions about whole categories, and that is the boundary where Sourcing insights starts to matter.
If your question is what an item sold for, how often, and to how many sellers, the free tool covers it completely. If your question is which categories currently show high demand against thin supply, the free tool cannot see that, because it works from searches you construct rather than from category-level aggregates.
eBay positions Sourcing insights specifically for that second question, including finding single-stock listings that signal where inventory is scarce. That is a wholesale buyer's question rather than a picker's. Someone deciding whether to add an entire product line needs it. Someone deciding whether to buy one item at a car boot sale does not.
The practical test is whether you are choosing between items or choosing between markets. Choosing between items stays free indefinitely.
The short version
Stop asking whether Terapeak is free. Product research is free to every Seller Hub seller and covers three years of sold data. Sourcing insights rides on a Basic Store subscription or above, so its price is whatever that tier costs in your market.
And if you are pricing from completed listings out of habit, switch. Three years beats 90 days, and a real Best Offer price beats an asking price every time.
Tool access and data scope verified against eBay's Product research help article on 5 August 2026. Store subscription prices verified 25 July 2026.