Scenes from eBay Live 2007 in Boston: Meg Whitman, Seth Godin and more
My first-day impression of eBay Live 2007 in Boston is that it is, as I suggested this morning, much smaller than last year’s event in Las Vegas. That’s a good thing. Last year’s Live was almost claustrophobic, with practically all facilities and many educational sessions and seminars overwhelmed by people. This year’s eBay Live is much more human friendly.
The major reason for the smaller crowds is of course that Boston is a brutally expensive place to visit compared to other popular convention locations, like Vegas and Orlando.
It seems to me that the Boston Convention and Exhibition Center has done its best to soak eBay for money. There are for example far more security guards at Live than there were at the stationery show a couple of months ago. On the other hand, eBay deserves it to some small extent since it hired a couple of Cliff and Norm imitators to entertain a function a couple of days ago (Cliff and Norm, as in the Cheers characters. I pretty much feel that Cheers characters are the Hub-version of blackface comedy, but perhaps native Bostonians feel differently).
Education is an important part of eBay Live. The photograph below is from a lecture on word of mouth marketing (it’s actually from a few minutes before the seminar started, most of the chairs were filled by the time the presentation got going).
One of the bigger names at this year’s Live is Seth Godin, a marketing evangelist who’s popular with the eBay crowd. Below is a photograph of Mr. Godin signing books after a presentation.
The center of the madness at Live is the so-called Solutions Center where companies hawk there wares to eBay sellers looking to boost sales, find products to sell, streamline listing, and otherwise improve productivity. EBay itself probably has most of the booths at the center, where it provides one-on-one training and other services. I haven’t more than quickly walked through the center this year, and I shall spend more time at it tomorrow, but here’s a photograph of a small part of the Center:
The first day of Live traditionally ends with keynote speeches by eBay big shots, and this year was no different. eBay’s CEO Meg Whitman lead off, followed by PayPal’s President Rajiv Dutta and then rounded off by eBay North America President Bill Cobb.
Mr. Dutta stressed PayPal’s commitment to fight fraud, protect merchants from fraud, and to make every address in the company’s system a Confirmed Address.
Mr. Cobb got a fairly chilly reception but scored points by promising to revamp and spice up eBay’s PowerSeller program. Among other things, eBay is considering giving extra weight in the site’s search results listing to PowerSellers, a move that could greatly influence which sellers bag sales. He also announced lower UPS rates for eBay sellers, as well as a pledge to better support the so-called eBay stores that were absolutely pummeled by last year’s fee increases. There was also the usual boilerplate denunciations of high shipping fees and sellers selling knock-off products.
Reactions to the keynote speeches:
Scot Wingo at eBay Strategies has a highlight summary with comments.
Rachel Rosmarin at Forbes thinks eBay is focusing on the wrong things:
Critics point to the company’s slowing revenue growth, a shrinking number of U.S. product listings on the site, pricey acquisitions that haven’t reaped returns, seller attrition to Amazon, outdated Web technology, and a stock price that has slipped more than 10% in the past two months to $31.50.
But Whitman didn’t address those issues
In fairness to Ms. Whitman, stock price and acquisitions are hardly of primary importance to eBay sellers, who make up the bulk of eBay Live visitors, and Mr. Cobb did talk about some of the Web 2.0-ish features about to be introduced (Mr. Wingo has more on that, see the link above). Furthermore, seller attrition is not a problem but an advantage for sellers who actually stick around.
