PeSA Summit 2006
September 20-22 2006
San Francisco, CA
Renaissance Stanfor Court Hotel
additional details on their web site at gopesa org /events/summit2006/reg.cfm -oops the link is broken.
:pesasht:
Quote:San Francisco Summit
So close. It's a pity my schedule is full that day. ;D
PeSA represents hundreds of the top high-volume eBay sellers, known as PowerSellers, who meet periodically to discuss best practices for eBay merchants.
The "best practice" for eBay merchants is... RUN!!!!!!!!!!!
PeSA Summit 2006 recap from Channel Advisor Scott Wingo's blog.
The E-commerce Merchants Trade Association makes its debut (
http://www.ecmta.org/ecmindex.cfm ).
Quote:The headlines:
* Google announced that Google Base listings will show as a refined product search, kind of like how Google has integrated base house listings, job listings, etc. Steady readers will remember I've been BIG on Google base for a long time and think its going to be disruptive to the organic search results to have this hear. Instead of worrying about SEO, focus on google base for Q4.
* Amazon had a huge crowd of Amazonians there to get eBay sellers over to their various platforms for SMBs.
* Google was represented by the AdWords team, checkout team and analytics team. Google clearly sees the mid-tier online retailer as a priority and is investing there with products as well as PR/marketing.
* eBay - While eBay had a couple of attendees, the vibe was that eBay and even eBay topics were absent from the agenda. This is a stark contrast to the last summit which was headlined by Bill Cobb, and had largely an eBay selling focus with some side topics on other channels.
* ECMTA - There's some confusion/drama around a new group evidently coming out of PESA (purportedly a splinter group) called the ECMTA. That stands for Ecommerce Merchants Trade Assocation...
full article:
http://ebaystrategies.blogs.com/ebay_str...rom_p.html
There was an interesting thread on the PS board about this, and a few people noted that eBay was noticeably absent from the podium. The Google and Amazon high "mucky-mucks" spoke, but eBay did not. And the first thing on the agenda was the analyst from Bear-Stearns who said that eBay is headed for a big downtown in early 2008.
Quote:Two-and-a half-years ago, 10 percent of PESA members had their own websites, and almost no one was using paid-search marketing, Garriss said. In a survey of members conducted in the Fall, over 50 percent of members had their own website
The over 50% figure was Fall 2005. This year will be much higher. Only a fool wouldn't be trying to lower costs by moving some of their business to websites (I should have said only a fool or someone so vain that they can't bring themselves to change the part of their about us page that says they have the highest feedback on eBay...hi, JayÂ
)
Quote: eBay is headed for a big downtown in early 2008.
The volume sellers will try to stick it out through the holidays (unless they go under) but I think after the holidays they'll be moving a lot more business off eBay to websites, Amazon, Overstock, and uBid. eBay needs to drastically lower its insertion fees (or move to subscription models like Overstock and Amazon) if it wants to keep sellers.