Heading to Ecommerce summit 2010

April 12, 2010
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Tonight, I am staying at a hotel at the local airport to leave early in the morning for Las Vegas to attend the Ecommerce Summit 2010.

People have been asking me what I look forward to the most about the trip.  The funny thing is for me it is as much about getting away and seeing a new place as it is the learning, networking and meeting new people.

I am really looking forward to meeting the people I did not meet in Atlanta for eBay on location last month and seeing the people that I have not yet met.

I look forward to networking with people whose businesses are where I would like my to be next year and 5 yrs in the future.  I want to learn effective ways to move my business forward in 2010 and beyond.

What truly amazed me though was how sad I was saying good bye to my kids.  I had an entire night tonight all on my own and realized I had not real idea what to do with it.  No kids to try to get to bed, no eBay listings to get accomplished.  So I actually sat and watched television for the first time in ages.

One of the most interesting thing I discovered when looking at the agenda for the week, is that thanks to social media over the last year I have build connections with a lot of the presenters there and if not the presenters themselves then people that know them.

Social media has been the best networking experience I have encountered.  I am years ahead of where I would have been if I had just stuck to reading forums and searching articles on the web.  I am learning daily what is really important and what is fluff, and I realize I do not have a lot of time for fluff in my life so I really appreciate the meat in the posts and tweets of the people I follow.

I am sure I will have much more to say over the course of the week so what my tweets, facebook pic and blog posts as the week goes on.

If you can’t make it to Las Vegas do like I did last year and make sure you listen to the podcasts from the Summit and watch any live video that is streamed on either You tube or Justin.tv.

I know I felt like I was there last year just with the amount of information that came out of the summit via social media.

Talk to you later in the week.

By Karen | Posted in ecommerce, social media | Tagged , , , | Comment (1)

Ecommerce sellers who really controls your business??

February 11, 2010
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I have read a lot of really interesting blog posts and had several thought provoking discussions this week which have me thinking about my online world.  To process it all  I decided to do a series of blog posts.  A case of me thinking out loud.  They are on a variety of subjects from networking, branding, social media ecosystems to ecommerce education.

The first one I decided to tackle was ecommerce education.  I read a very interesting blog post by my friend John on his ColderICE blog called,  Each One, Teach One: eCommerce OPEN Discussion. and it made me realize that as ecommerce sellers we need to learn all we can to enable us to run our own businesses as effectively as possible.

The old saying that knowledge is power is as true today as it ever was, the greater the opportunities the internet affords us the greater the knowledge base we need to be able to access.  The more you learn the more you are able to control your own business.

The majority of people I interact with online line are ecommerce sellers, but their main source of income is the eBay platform or the Amazon platform, with just a minor secondary emphasis on multi-channel selling, and that made me realize that I don’t want to be known  primarilyas an eBay seller.   I don’t care to allow one person or entity that much control over my business.

Think about it, if eBay or Amazon or any of the other platforms that you base your entire business model on were to become an untenable situation what would you do?  Do you have the skill set to be able to run your business on your own?  If  your platform based business is how you feed your family do you have enough time or money to start from scratch elsewhere?

Now I know that neither eBay or Amazon are not going to disappear tomorrow or anytime in the near or distant future but they are both large corporations and large corporations do fail, look at the banks, car manufacturers and insurance companies a lot of them were on the brink of failure when the government and tax payers bailed them out.

Will the government bailout out all the small business that fail if their marketplace crashes?  It would be the equivalent of a massive layoff with no unemployment insurance.

You need to arm yourself with as much information as possible to control your own business, otherwise you are no different than an employee of a large company.  Most of us work in ecommerce because we want to work for ourselves not for somebody else.  Make sure you take the time to learn.  Find others that can teach you and in  turn teach others.  Only by doing that can you really continue to be successful.

What did you learn today?

Who did you teach?

By Karen | Posted in eBay, ecommerce | Tagged , , | Comments (6)