Andrew Sukow began developing Internet applications in 1994 at the age of 14.
“The Internet was so new and so vast,” he said. “All the new technologies that would come out, I just couldn’t get enough of.”
That led to an early career developing online applications as a consultant for a number of firms.
In his spare time, during his computer science studies at the University of Victoria, Sukow would write downloadable packages of code and then auction them off on eBay to businesses.
Sukow acquired a sense of the power of e-commerce, but his early entrepreneurial activity on eBay also presented a conundrum: why would the same software sell for $59 on the online auction site one week and then sell for $259 the following week?
Sukow developed a software program to answer the question.
Known as TeraPeak, the program sorts through the vast amount of transaction data archived on eBay.
With his brother Anthony, Sukow founded Advanced Ecommerce Research Systems Inc. (AERS) in 2004 to market TeraPeak.
AERS was the first company to be granted a licence to access the data behind the millions of transactions that occur on eBay monthly.
With Andrew leading product development and Anthony leading business development and financing, AERS became so adept at extracting and organizing eBay’s transactional data, eBay handed it the responsibility of selling the data to other businesses.
Today, businesses ranging in size from the individual entrepreneur to Fortune 500 companies use AERS’ eBay research products to price products and services that are sold on eBay, identify consumer trends and forecast stock-market fluctuations and earnings of public companies.
“We’re really focused on making a really profitable business that helps people,” said Sukow.
AERS has just launched two applications for researching the transactional data produced by another giant of e-commerce – PayPal. •
