As Powersellers, my wife and I hemmed and hawed a little about attending the 2007 eBay Live Convention in Boston.  We live in the NYC metro area, less than 4 hours car ride up to Red Sox Country! (GO Yankees!) and we finally decided to give it a try!

We just got back and all I can say is WOW!, what a Great Trip!

eBay takes excellent care of the Powersellers throughout the conference.  There was a special floor reserved just for Powerseller attendees.  The first day of the conference at 8am was a Powerseller orientation.  One of the announcements made during the presentation was that eBay would be taking 500 Powersellers to dinner the first night of the conference at various restaurants in Boston.  My wife and I signed up and had a lovely dinner on eBay that evening!  (After all the eBay and PayPal fees we pay, this was awesome!)

There are computer terminals on the Powerseller floor and located in various places around the conference hall.  It was very easy to stay in touch with our eBay Sales and also our Emails.

The conference was extremely well organized.  My wife and I both felt that the best classes we attended were led by the numerous 3rd party authors/experts that eBay invited in to teach.  We attended classes taught by Seth Godin (Author - "The Dip", "The Purple Cow",etc.), John Gardner (Author - "Chicken Soup for the Entrepreneurs Soul") and also a panel hosted by 4 eBay top Powersellers.  We gathered tidbits of useful information on everything from marketing to scalability to profitability analysis.

Seven Steps to Scalability was an eBay program offered on the exhibition floor.  We spent approximately 20 minutes with a consultant looking at our listings and our eBay store and offering us many useful tips... (Example - Google crawls eBay Stores - make sure your store header has a description of what items you sell including the brand names...)

Throughout the conference the song "Celebration" was played in the conference center.  This signaled that eBay employees were giving out free stuff - Conference Pins and Coins.  We were able to get some extras and put these items up for sale, helping us to pay for the cost of attending the conference.

The closing gala on the last night was excellent.  All attendees were queued up to enter the room, with only a few going in at a time.  There were 100s of eBay employees clapping and cheering you on as you entered the room.  I think this is the closest I will come to feeling like a rock star!

The bottom line is that eBay does this conference extremely well and we learned a lot of useful information that we have already begun applying to our business.  I would recommend attending this event next year.  See you in Chicago in 2008!