Seller Development's Thoughts on CES

Like Delyn last week, Aashish from our Seller Development team stopped by with his thoughts about this year's CES show.

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As usual, eBay had a strong presence this year at CES.  If you attended the show it would have been hard to miss our booth which was located at the entrance of the main lobby, across from the Starbucks (which had longer lines than Space Mountain in Disneyland).  I was part of a group of about 50 eBay, Paypal and Skype employees who attended the show.  Our booth got a lot of traffic over four days, as we had computer kiosks and a very cool Skype demo. I find it amazing how in the last four to five years, people have stopped asking about what eBay does or what it can do for them, and have started asking very sophisticated and direct questions about how they can use eBay to run a business. 

In addition to our booth presence we also held several seller meetings, since many of our sellers attend the show as well.  Overall sellers liked what they were seeing at the show.  Many sellers commented on how the show has changed from a “show of the future” to more of a tradeshow.  Years ago CES used to feature a lot of products which were still in the prototype phase - often you'd have to wait 3 to 5 years before the product was on the market.  Now the show features a number of products which will be released later this year, which makes for a more tradeshow-type environment.

I did find some time to enjoy Vegas with my fellow eBay employees. We visited the new Wynn Hotel, which has a Ferrari dealership located inside!  I spent a few moments looking at some cars that I will never be able to afford.  Since that Monday was the college football national championship game, Vegas was overrun with Florida and Ohio State fans; it was interesting to watch the game in the presence of both sets of fans.  Sadly, it wasn’t much of a game.   

On my flight back from Vegas, I had my eBay Staff shirt on, and was stopped at the airport by an individual who asked – “hey, did you see that new 108 foot plasma TV at CES?”  I said nodded, and he said “how soon till you all have that on eBay” - I laughed and asked him to keep checking back every day!