Q&A: Will you attend the Amazon Sellers Conference?
QUESTION: I live a long way from Seattle but am considering attending the Amazon Sellers Conference next month. Will you attend? Have you been to previous conferences or heard any comments on how helpful they are?
ANSWER: I'm a long way from Seattle, too. And as much as I'd like to escape the heat and humidity of Virginia this time of year, I can't justify a trip to Seattle.
I love bookselling, but the main reason I do it is to pay my bills. And about 25 percent of my annual sales happen in August, just like other online booksellers. So shutting down my business during the most important part of the year to take an expensive cross-country trip isn't in the cards.
Even if the scheduling was better, I'm skeptical. According to sellers who've attended in previous years, results have been mixed.
I'm certainly not trying to discourage other people from attending. For sellers who live close to the west coast, I'm sure it will be fun to meet and schmooze with fellow booksellers, and -- who knows -- making some contacts with Amazon employees will come in handy someday.
But my impression -- from a lot of experience -- is that Amazon is very, very reluctant to listen to anyone outside the company, which is a shame. They should be picking sellers' brains for everything we know. We have an understanding of Amazon's business that no $2,000-an-hour consultant could provide -- because we're actually living it and breathing it.
Despite all my gripes about Amazon, I still recommend it as the best place to sell books online, and I'm grateful to have made a living doing it for the past six years. It's just tantalizing to think of the possibilities, though, if there were open lines of communications between Amazon's staff and its sellers.
Recently I listened to an audio replay of a question-and-answer session from eBay's official seller conference from this summer. The eBay sellers were grilling eBay's top executives. It was a real, unvarnished discussion of the problems eBay sellers are having. My hunch is that:
1) eBay is working furiously on fixing the problems the sellers brought up, and will figure out a way to get it done, or;
2) eBay's future is shaky.
ANSWER: I'm a long way from Seattle, too. And as much as I'd like to escape the heat and humidity of Virginia this time of year, I can't justify a trip to Seattle.
I love bookselling, but the main reason I do it is to pay my bills. And about 25 percent of my annual sales happen in August, just like other online booksellers. So shutting down my business during the most important part of the year to take an expensive cross-country trip isn't in the cards.
Even if the scheduling was better, I'm skeptical. According to sellers who've attended in previous years, results have been mixed.
I'm certainly not trying to discourage other people from attending. For sellers who live close to the west coast, I'm sure it will be fun to meet and schmooze with fellow booksellers, and -- who knows -- making some contacts with Amazon employees will come in handy someday.
But my impression -- from a lot of experience -- is that Amazon is very, very reluctant to listen to anyone outside the company, which is a shame. They should be picking sellers' brains for everything we know. We have an understanding of Amazon's business that no $2,000-an-hour consultant could provide -- because we're actually living it and breathing it.
Despite all my gripes about Amazon, I still recommend it as the best place to sell books online, and I'm grateful to have made a living doing it for the past six years. It's just tantalizing to think of the possibilities, though, if there were open lines of communications between Amazon's staff and its sellers.
Recently I listened to an audio replay of a question-and-answer session from eBay's official seller conference from this summer. The eBay sellers were grilling eBay's top executives. It was a real, unvarnished discussion of the problems eBay sellers are having. My hunch is that:
1) eBay is working furiously on fixing the problems the sellers brought up, and will figure out a way to get it done, or;
2) eBay's future is shaky.
posted by Steve Weber at 7/19/2006
1 Comments:
I've only been selling on Amazon since May, on ebay since 1999. I have been pleasantly surprised by the quick sales on Amazon. I just signed up for the conference yesterday, I do believe the 21st of July is the deadline. I am in Northern CA, so the cost of travel won't be too high. I would much rather travel to Seattle for a conference, than Las Vegas, where ebay held theirs. I hope to learn a lot more about opportunities on Amazon, and I am looking forward to meeting other home-based booksellers.
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