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Friday, June 20, 2008

Ebay Live - Powersellers Unhappy

Is Ebay killing the goose that laid the golden eggs?

Many Power sellers at the Ebay live conference voiced their opinions about how unhappy they are with the new increase in rates by Ebay, the inability to provide buyer's response, and their frustration with Paypal.

Ebay is rolling out a lot of benificial programs for their best sellers - but the sweeping changes are making many of their power sellers very uncomfortable.

Much of the frustration lies with the fact that buyers are favored in transactions. Cliff Ennico J.D. pointed out at his packed seminar on the "Legal Aspects of Doing Business on eBay" that Ebay is just doing what the legal system does in favoring the buyer. Seller have to expect a 1-2% loss rate on their sales. Fellow attendees who dealt in big ticket items seemed to have the most problems. Those in low margin businesses did not seem to care about a few deadbeats.

Although the website said this would be the last Ebay live I heard today Ebay is just skipping a year and plans the next conference in Orlando in 2010.

Many at the conference were also disappointed that Ebay chose not to provide the handouts to the attendants this year.

"It's too much to take in, I would like to go to all the lectures but they sometimes schedule 12 at a time!" lamented a newbie.

The quality of the speakers has overall been excellent. This is a field that changes dramatically from year to year.

One of the biggest changes has been embracing Web 2.0. There were many lectures on Cross Channel marketing, SEO, and Blogging for the Ebay community.

The need for Video was described as the perfect storm by Speakers Steve Lindhorst and Mikal Belicove. With Web 2.0 spurred on by YouTube success, and the need for more teleconferencing due to high gas prices.

The Experiential Materialist




Why "The Experiential Materialist?" This was a name a college classmate came up with for me.

I always wanted to direct a movie that would juxtapose all the different emotional experiences in a manner that the Movie Baraka did. Baraka is movie that is a merely a collection of expertly photographed scenes It is an incredible nonverbal film containing images of 24 countries from 6 continents that takes you on a visual journey. I feel life is a emotional journey - a collection of our experiences and not the material possessions that we are conditioned to strive for by the advertising driven economy.

Some of my idea's come from watching Qui-chang-cain walking across the dessert with nothing but his clothing and a small satchel across the country. He always had a newnexperience every week... it would be so liberating to be so comfortable with so little. Modern society encumbers us with so much material baggage ... like barnacles on a whale it weighs us down and slows us down.

When I lived in Miami, Florida - I learned to sail on Dinner Key Marina, where I learned many International Boats would weigh anchor. Some families would live on the boats. They could never accumulate very much as the boats would limit their belongings.

I experience the freedom of not having many physical possessions when I was in the Navy. When I left for Diego Garcia I had two bags which I lived out of for 6 months. I was attached to an P3 Air Squadron and which did a Quad site deployment. I often woke up at night wondering what country, and what time zone I was in.

I read a wonderful blog post at the following site:
http://www.spring.org.uk/2008/01/experiences-beat-possessions-why.php