eBay In Person - San Francisco

Working on the Community Development team definitely has its perks. Last Wednesday (October 24th) we got to get away from our cubicles a little early, climbed on a bus, and traveled up the highway to San Francisco for our latest "eBay In Person." If you've never heard of eBay In Person, the best way to describe it is -- it's a mini eBay Live! We usually travel to a city that has a high percentage of eBay members and organize an event for members to meet with eBay teams. It's a great event for members as well as for the company -- attendees get their questions answered face-to-face, eBay teams get to hear directly from our members what's on their minds. Everyone learns from each other. (Our recent eBay In Person events were in New York -- one in Manhattan and the other in Buffalo.)

eBay In Person in San Francisco was special because it marked only the second time we'd held one in our home territory, the Bay Area. The close proximity not only made it easier to plan the event, but we were able to bring more employees than we typically do as well (such as me).

After getting off the bus at The Westin hotel - our venue for the evening - we sped through a quick orientation and a snack, and took our places. I was assigned to the Registration desk for the first hour, which was great because that meant I got to meet all the attendees as they came in. I also learned that I am remarkably bad at stacking in a visually pleasing manner the bags of goodies each attendee got. The package included some useful educational material about eBay as well as some eBay-branded memorabilia.

After they checked in, the attendees made their way into the main ballroom, where they found tables staffed with eBay employees ready to handle their questions. Each table had a theme - such as Buying, Selling, Trust & Safety, etc. - to make it easy for everyone to find experts in each field. I manned the Networking table, where I showed people how they could meet and interact with others, such as on our discussion boards, through eBay Groups, and in our newly-released eBay Neighborhoods. During the evening I met exoakasbatboy, a gentleman who, as his ID suggests, used to be a batboy for the Oakland A's. He has a ton of fantastic baseball memorabilia (and my jealousy only increased as he went through the list), but was having some trouble getting into his account. I helped him out - mainly so I could go bid on some of the stuff he wanted to sell!

Members got the opportunity to ask their questions directly to eBay execs
We then moved to the Executive Panel portion that featured John Donahoe (President of eBay Marketplaces), Matt Halprin (Trust & Safety), Dana Stalder (PayPal), Carolyn Frongner (Customer Support), Jim Ambach (Seller Experience), Jamie Iannone (Buyer Experience), Jeff Clementz (PayPal), and Gary Briggs (eBay Marketing). As usual, Griff was our host/question-taker, and as usual, our members kept him very busy.

We had several sellers who were experts in the categories they sold in. They wanted to know what eBay was doing to "clean up" these categories and get rid of obvious counterfeit items. Matt Halprin was very interested to talk to them one-on-one after the event and listen to their ideas. Another member's question was on microfinance. He said it was an area where eBay's Community and marketplace strengths could come into play and asked if we had any forays planned into this area. Great timing -- just that day eBay had announced the launch of MicroPlace.com!

The executive panel also fielded questions about the PayPal dispute process, including why members had to wait so long to re-list an Unpaid Item (Matt Halprin told a member that she didn't actually have to wait until the two weeks were up to re-list her item in all cases). Several new sellers had questions about how to best get started in their eBay businesses, and one person pitched the room into laughter - and nods of agreement - when they not-so-subtly asked us to extend our current listing fee promotion.

After about an hour, the panel disbanded, and the execs stayed back to answer a few more individual questions before we all hopped back on the bus for the ride back to San Jose. All in all, it was a great event, and I'm already looking forward to the next one.