Steve Woda's Blog

Where Can You Meet the Largest Merchants on eBay?

Every couple of months, the Professional eBay Sellers Alliance (PESA) pulls together a collection of eBay's largest, most successful merchants.  These events are always terrific opportunities to meet experienced e-commerce professionals, and to get an insider's view of how the e-commerce market is developing.  Next week, PESA will convene its sixth PESA Summit in Chicago.

buySAFE has attended every one of these remarkable semi-annual events.  In fact, we have sponsored every PESA event since the organization's inception, so we are obviously a huge supporter of this organization.

Therefore, I wanted to give next week's PESA Summit a mini-plug.  If you are a professional merchant or simply interested in e-commerce because you are a member of the media, a financial analyst or a third-party service provider, you should attend this event.  You won't be sorry.  You will meet amazing folks and get the inside scoop on where e-commerce and eBay are headed.  Christie Hefner of Playboy Enterprises will be giving the Keynote Address.

As a side note, I will be speaking at the PESA Summit on an interesting panel of e-commerce experts including Jonathan Gariss (CEO for GothamCityOnline), Sloan Gaon (VP of Global Strategy for MIVA), and Jimmy Duvall (Director of e-Commerce Products for Yahoo! Small Business).  The Website Design & Web 2.0 panel should be very interesting, and I will provide a summary of the discussion on this blog after the event.

I am looking forward to it, and I hope you can find your way to Chicago for this terrific event.

Google Planning Product Search for Holidays

The Professional eBay Sellers Alliance (PESA) held its semi-annual gather in San Francisco this past week.  The PESA Summit 2006 was a huge success with many of eBay's largest sellers in attendance in addition to many of the most important companies in ecommerce.  buySAFE has sponsored every PESA Summit since the group's inception in 2004. 

Although the group includes eBay in its name, most of these merchants are actually multi-channel retailers seeking to sell product whereever they can make reasonable profits.  These days, that actually means eBay sellers want to sell off eBay.  AuctionBytes has recently produced some very interesting research on the trend to move beyond eBay.  ChannelAdvisor's Scot Wingo covered eBay's challenges on his blog last week as well  I will be writing more about this trend over the coming days because it is obviously important for all of us in ecommerce.

Fall 2006 PESA (Professional eBay Sellers Alliance) Summit in San Francisco, CA

The Professional eBay Sellers Alliance (PESA) has announced that its Fall 2006 Summit will take place in San Francisco, California on 9/20/06 - 9/22/06.  I have attended three or four PESA Summits, and they are always fabulous events.  The attendees list includes many of eBay's largest merchants, and since most of them run fairly large multi-channel operations, these sellers also represent some of the most successful small and medium e-commerce retailers in the world.  Many of the largest e-commerce service providers will also be in attendance including eBay, Google, Overstock.com Auctions, Amazon.com, PayPal, buySAFE, ChannelAdvisor, and Infopia.  Therefore, the Summit is a great business development event as well.

If you haven't registered for the event, you should do so quickly.  The event is limited to the first 300 registrants.  You can register at PESA's website.