Summary of happenings at ChannelAdvisor Catalyst

Phew, apologies for the radio silence, but our annual Catalyst event and the week or so leading up to it are so intense and immersive that there's barely time to sleep, much less blog.  The good news is we had a number of bloggers at the event that did a better job than I could have ever hoped to.  Here's a linkfest of coverage that came out of the event (in chrono order):

• Before the conference, we announced 170 new retail customers signed on to ChannelAdvisor Complete solutions.
• Opening the conference we had Chris Shimojima from Nike which was covered by e-consultancy here.
• At the conference we announced a partnership with Buy.com and were really pleased that Buy.com's CEO Neel Grover was able to make a guest appearance during my morning kick-off. Neel's a reformed lawyer which is a plus and Tank Stikman was excited to hear that Neel worked at a place called ThinkTank.
• Tamebay covered the buy.com news here.
• Chris@Tamebay live blogged Stephanie Tilenius' talk and had some interesting thoughts.
• It was an honor to have eBay's new blogger, Richard Brewer-hay, cover Stephanie's talk in the first days of the new eBay Ink blog - Richard welcome to the conversation (FYI this blogging stuff works from NC as well as San Jose! and ChannelAdvisor is one word.)
  
• Chris@Tamebay had some interesting thinking coming out of Sebastian's Amazon keynote and he was right, we had many sellers connect these dots. One thing that would be funny to test is what would Amazon's FBA DSRs be on an eBay seller account!?
• Tamebay coverage of Ben Ling from Facebook's keynote Thursday.  Ben gave a great talk about the social graph and how Facebook believes it's actually quite relevant to e-commerce.

There were three more general overview items of interest:

• Chris@Tamebay spoke to several UK+US sellers about UK/US cross border trade (CBT) here.
• In one interview, I said it would be interesting to see John Donahoe at eBay Live as I'm not really sure they mix.  Chris@tamebay covered that here and e-consultancy covered it here. BTW, don't assume that calling eBay Live a circus is a bad thing - that's just what the event 'is' (if you've been there, you know what I mean).

There were a number of Wall St. analysts at the event and there was some interesting action there.  Justin Post @Merrill upgraded eBay to Buy this morning and Shawn Milne @ Oppenheimer raised his price target.  I'm sure there will be some other insights later this week and I'll try and summarize them this weekend.

Finally, I participated in a fun talk show with the folks at Internet Auction News Radio that will air on April 5th.

It's a wrap!
Every year our team raises the bar on this event and adds some new fresh content that keeps retailers coming back and this year they really set the bar very high.  We had a consumer panel that was well received and I was pretty surprised how many attendees really raved over the social networking panel and Facebook presentations.  Thanks to the team for all the hard work and thanks to all of the sponsors, partners and most importantly retailers that came to the event!

Up next, Catalyst UK.
Starting April 21, the Catalyst comes to London and we'll be continuing the great discussions around multiple e-commerce channels!

Comments

[George]

ChannelAdvisor clients not yet seeing macro economic slowdown Biggest surprise to us was the general consensus among the retailers we spoke with that they were not seeing much impact from macro-economic headwinds. Consumer spending remains strong in many categories and sellers were confident that their multi-channel strategies can continue to fuel growth.

[Todd Oldham]

Best conference ever attended. Very good information. NMS will be making several changes for a very strong 2008.

Thanks ChannelAdvisor and a special thanks to Scot

Todd Oldham
National Music Supply, Inc.

[Sue @ TameBay]

"reformed lawyer" - love it!

[Douglas]

Hi Scott,

I hear catalyst was a great event from Dan, and I look forward to London, which I hope to get to!

Reading Chris from Tamebays comments about CBT, it does raise a few concerns with myself. Firstly I have no problems with an open market, but there is a lot more to think about.

I know that distributors in each country/continent all have agreements with the brands parent companies, where they are not allowed to let the retailers directly sell the products in a different country/continent. Do you see this Amazon distribution model possibly breaching the agreements that we have in place with distributors?

I ask as we have had a small issue with amazon.de, where we have opened a store front directly on the .de website, but all of our brands will not let us trade directly on the .de site as it goes against the distribution agreements that are in place with the parent companies.

Your thoughts?

[Chris]

"what would Amazon's FBA DSRs be on an eBay seller account!?"

Scot.... that would just be a naughty thing to test.... but very very amusing! :-D

[Dave]

Scott, I just got back from Catalyst, and my hat is off to you, Michael Jones, and the entire CA team. Congratulations on an e-commerce forum that just keeps getting better and better. I am inspired, energized and already working new ideas into our business plan for the balance of 2008. The opportunity to seamlessly (I hope!) add Buy.com as a new channel in time to capture Q408 sales is icing on the cake.

One thing that I could not help noticing is the obvious contrast between speakers from Web 2.0 companies such as Google and Facebook and Web 1.0 companies, such as eBay and PayPal. The first were dynamic, inspiring and exciting, offering extemporaneous presentations by enthusiastic presenters who appeared to be personally invested in what they were doing and saying. In contrast, the eBay and PayPal speakers read scripted remarks, appeared to wish they were elsewhere, and gave answers that did not really address the issues raised by some questioners. Heck, they didn't even show much empathy. I think their uptight communications reflect a corporate culture that is fixated on Wall Street and not Main Street and that is governed by lawyers, not retailers or marketers.

From my perspective as a relatively happy Platinum seller who still counts on eBay for 25% of our revenue, nothing eBay said at Catalyst did anything to mitigate the seller relations debacle they created with their recent announcements. I think they missed an opportunity to apologize for the way in which they made sellers feel like second class citizens, promise to pay more attention to our concerns, and announce a few changes that would have benefited sellers (like allowing us to leave negative feedback in some circumstances). A small concession and acknowledgement that they hear us would have gone a long way for eBay with an important audience of sellers.

But back to my point about the contrast between Web 1.0 and Web 2.0 companies. I think the difference between the companies of yesterday and the companies of today and tomorrow probably reflects their respective corporate culture. Maybe I'm drinking their Cool-Ade, but I think Google and Facebook really do want to use technology to make the world a better place. Compared to this, "enhancing the buyer experience" is corporate-speak that doesn't really resonate.

When companies like Google and Apple roll out something new, customers say things like "Wow, that's cool" and "ohmigod, I can't wait." In contrast, people protest eBay's changes and cringe when they get close to implementation. I'm glad I don't work there; I can't imagine it's much fun anymore.

BTW, I don't mean to leave Amazon out. They also gave a good presentation and even more importantly, you could tell Sebastian really wanted to resolve issues during the Q&A. I think someone at Catalyst referred to Amazon.com as Web 1.5. If that means the best of both worlds, I would have to agree.