How the Tera Shopping App Works  

The Tera app is designed to help you find consumer products (food, personal care, cosmetics, and household cleaning products) that are good for you, your family, and the planet.
Users can create a personal profile to be alerted to products that contain chemicals that are harmful to their health, allergens they or someone in their household are sensitive to, nutrition facts that matter to them, and how harmful products are to our Planet.

How do I set up my personal shopping preferences?

In one minute, you'll be able to personalize the app by selecting your shopping preferences based on what's important to you!

This will personalize your product scores, product searches, product recommendations, and your marketplace. To get you started, we pre-selected a couple of the most impactful shopping preferences in each category (except for ingredients/allergens).
But, these are your shopping values, so please make them your own, and remember you can always update them in the future as well any time in your profile.

How are my shopping preferences used? 

We use your preferences to match products and create a personal shop, search, recommendations, and buying experience just for you. The better the match, the higher the product ranks in your personal shop and in search results. For each product, we highlight the match score and how each preference meets your criteria.

How do I find out more about a product?

Simply click on the product you’re interested in and you will see more details about that product.  You will notice how well the product matches your shopping preferences based on the color associated with each preference.

.

Each preference is clickable, so you can get more information about the product such as:

1) Brief explanation of our analysis

2) Specific ingredients to be aware of based on that preference  

3) The corresponding official ECHA and GHS hazard statements to alert you to the specific level of risk  

That’s nifty, what about if I want to find out more about an ingredient?

We got you covered.  For each product, we display potential allergens and all ingredients and highlight those you should be most concerned about.    Each ingredient is ‘clickable’ to reveal more information about that ingredient, including specific hazard alerts.   

How do I use the app to shop for food?

When you download the Tera app, it prompts you to input key specifications regarding your dietary preferences and needs. Once we receive your information, we will analyze the data found on the Nutrition Facts labels based on your unique requirements. Then we rank products so that it’s easy for you to make the right choices for your health.

If you do not choose any parameters for your nutrition needs, your settings will default to the guidelines best for the average, healthy adult.  These guidelines are outlined by the U.S. Food and Drugs Administration (FDA) and the Food and Nutrition Board.

Of those parameters, we consider the following categories:

• The type of fats and whether they are heart-healthy or not
• The amount of cholesterol and sodium per serving
• The type and quality of the carbohydrates, based on total fiber and percentage of added sugar
• The total amount of protein in a particular product
• As well as key vitamins and minerals including Vitamin D, Calcium, Iron, and Potassium.

Wow! Ok, that’s a lot of work, so how do you make money?

When possible, we leverage affiliate programs for the products we find.  That means some of the products in the marketplace earn a very small percentage when purchased through the Tera link.  Currently, we earn through the Amazon Associate Affiliate program but look to expand in order to maintain a free app, expand into other categories (like food), and find more healthy product options.   

However, we do not collect, analyze, or display products based on any affiliate programs or any other 3rd party compensation.  In fact, many of the products in the marketplace are not associated with any affiliate program at all.  They are simply good products we collected and analyzed for the Tera community. 

The Tera system works because we are independent from any retailer and remain 100% objective in our analysis and are singularly focused on finding, analyzing, and providing better products for you and the planet.