Are You Going to eBay Live?

As many readers of this blog are aware, eBay Live 2007 in Boston is less than 60 days away. Each year, the buySAFE team looks forward to this event with great anticipation, as it gives us a chance to spend time with our many merchant customers, as well as the eBay community at large. It also gives us a great opportunity to see some of the interesting things that other eBay certified solutions providers in the space are doing.

In years past, we’ve invested heavily in this show, sending a large buySAFE contingent and maintaining a big booth on the floor of the convention. Although this approach has been very effective for raising the overall awareness of buySAFE among the eBay community, we found that it has not always provided enough opportunities for one-on-one interactions with our current customers and most other service providers would attest, it doesn’t provide a good return on the high investment required to have a booth. Likewise, the format is not as effective as it could be in providing opportunities for us to meet with the prospective customers who can most benefit from our service.

So, this year we’re taking a slightly different approach to eBay Live. While we’ll still be sending a large group of buySAFE employees to eBay Live, we’ve decided not to display on the exhibit floor. Instead, we will be doing several things to ensure that we have the opportunity to meet with those sellers interested in buySAFE either for their eBay sales or for their website:

1) Scheduled On-Site Business Impact Meetings – For current and prospective customers, buySAFE will be scheduling one-on-one meetings to discuss conversion impact results (actual and forecasted) for individual businesses. We will be proactively reaching out to specific businesses, but please contact us at customersupport@buysafe.com if you’d like to schedule a time to meet with a buySAFE representative at the show.

2) buySAFE Lunch Seminar – “eBay and Beyond – A Primer for Multi-Channel Merchants” – During eBay Live, buySAFE will hold a lunch seminar for current and prospective customers that focuses on issues faced by merchants looking to utilize eBay as part of a multi-channel e-commerce strategy. This seminar will feature speakers from top companies in the industry, and will include a free lunch at a premier waterfront restaurant in Boston, courtesy of buySAFE. Space for this seminar is extremely limited, so please contact us at customersupport@buysafe.com if you’d like to be considered for an invitation to this event.

3) Participation in eBay Developers Conference – Representatives from buySAFE’s product management team will be participating in the eBay Developers Conference, and will also be available to answer any technical or development questions you might have.

4) Seller Meet & Greet. Over the past few years the Seller Meet & Greet event, for which buySAFE has been the primary sponsor, has been a huge success. Last year, there were an estimated 700-800 attendees at the event which takes place the evening before the 1^st day of eBay Live. The Seller Meet & Greet is a community driven event and one that we are big fans of. This year, its still a little uncertain as to whether the community will be having it again, but if so, you can expect us to be there again as a supporter. We hope you’ll also attend.

In taking this approach, we believe that we’ll be better able to spend quality time with merchants without the hustle and bustle that often accompanies trying to hold a meaningful conversation on a tradeshow floor. Likewise, by alleviating the logistical burden of preparing for the event (i.e. booth shipment, signage, tchotchkes, etc.), we can devote more time to focusing on providing merchants like you the information you really want to know – what impact buySAFE is having or will have on your business. We’ve built some very robust analytic tools to specifically measure how much buySAFE increases your website’s conversion rate, average transaction sizes and repeat buyer rates, so we want to make sure you use them to understand how buySAFE helps your business.

An ancillary benefit of not having a booth at eBay Live is that it will allow us to spread our tradeshow budget across several new events. As those who read this blog know, buySAFE has been very busy since the last eBay Live. Perhaps our biggest accomplishment since that time was making buySAFE available for merchant websites, as opposed to just eBay, Overstock.com Auctions and TIAS. In so doing, we’ve also opened up buySAFE to an entirely new group of customers, who attend not only eBay Live, but also events like Internet Retailer, Shop.org and eTail. By investing more appropriately in our eBay presence, we are able to ensure a significant presence at these and other events where we can introduce buySAFE to others who can benefit from our service.

We’re anxious to put this new approach into action, and I look forward to seeing all of you at eBay Live. Since space is so limited, if you’d like to be considered for a slot in either the business impact meetings or the lunch seminar, drop us a line today at customersupport@buysafe.com.