eBay ecommerce forum and fee increases

Last year eBay held a get together for the top 100-200 sellers and they are doing it again this year in SFO Jan 16-18 as Bill Cobb discusses in his "fee adjustment" AB post.

Later this month, I'll be addressing a group of eBay sellers who will be here in person in the San Jose area, and I'll be sharing some of our plans and priorities for the coming year. My keynote speech will be available via a recorded Webcast for our whole Community to tune into. And we'll also be following the event with more announcements on specific initiatives. I think you'll find we're taking a surprisingly fresh look at some of the old challenges, and I'm excited about the road ahead.

I'll be attending the event and hope to do some live blogging for those of you that aren't able to attend.  It's also interesting that the keynote will be Webcast (not clear if it's going to be live or not and it's not on the investor events site) to the whole community which will be great.

I do know one thing, the top of mind areas for eBays top 200 sellers are:

1. What am I getting for these fee increases and
2. How can I grow my off-eBay business faster?

For a great take on a large seller's thoughts on the fee increases check out Kevin Harmon's blog (Kevin is CEO of inflatablemadness - a top 50 by feedback seller of media.).

I also suspect eBay will address some of the other top of mind issues with sellers:

1. Fraud, fraud fraud - They've started peeling the onion and I think there will be many more layers to the strategy revealed
2. I'll go out on a limb and guess that with the "stick" of the fee increases, we will see a "carrot". I'd guess it will be in the form of some seller's reward program that is geared towards giving growing sellers a break on their fees in the form of some PayPal $, etc.
3. eBay Express - DOA, it will be interesting to see if eBay capitulates here or continues to soldier on.  My guess is we'll be seeing a EE/shopping.com hybrid as a 2.0 kind of solution that will be a step in the right direction.  Incorporating unique items from smaller sellers with the more commodity items from larger retailers is something that hasn't been done before and eBay is uniquely positioned to make happen.
4. Personally I think the biggest break eBay could give sellers is to allow them to send eBay transactions through Google Checkout - that would basically give sellers 2% BACK.  I don't think we'll see that in 07 unfortunately.
5. Loose ends - there are still some loose ends around the great rebalance of 06.  For example, back then Cobb promised some exposure for store sellers and relief for media sellers.
6. Multi-channel - eBay increasingly is feeling the heat from the competition so it will be interesting to see what they plan here.  In the past ProStores was the big multi-channel push for eBay and it is really thrashing with little to no adoption.  Note the name of the conference is the eBay "ecommerce forum".  So that implies it won't be just about auctions/ebay.com.
7. Finally, I bet we'll get to meet the new team members - Philip Justus, Michael Linton and some other fresh faces as part of the reorg.

eBay Strategies readers - if you had questions to ask eBay or feedback to give eBay senior management what would be top of mind with you?