Jodi Gaines Pereira, co-founder of ReplyManager which was acquired by XSellco early in 2015, is at The PROSPER Show and exclusively reporting back on some of the sessions for Tamebay:
Today Jodi shares her thoughts on the show as a whole and insights from talking to the show’s founders.
The PROSPER Show founders
James Thomson is a self-proclaimed socialist from Canada. He’s also an incredibly passionate, ex-Amazonian, that always felt Amazon lacking in seller education. In fact, he’s made a career out of it with his company Buy Box Experts. But to reach the masses, he, along with business partner Joseph Hansen and two other founders, created the annual PROSPER Show – the first ever US e-commerce conference with a format predominantly panel-based, made up of handpicked industry experts. There was no pay to play in this group.
A Serious Place to Learn for Amazon Sellers
Why is this so special? The founders wanted to promote an open conversation between competitors, experts and the audience of online sellers to share different perspectives on solving problems in the online selling community. It’s a fresh approach, one that did garner a few heated discussions (I was told my own panel “Using Feedback to Build Your Reputation on Amazon“ got a bit exciting at the end). There were also a few one microphone, one speaker sessions, namely the keynote from John Rossman, co-founder of the Amazon Marketplace.
Other topics included: VAT and US tax compliance, feedback, repricing, private labeling, selling a business, inventory management, product sourcing (US & Worldwide), diversifying your business beyond Amazon, retail arbitrage, social media and SEO.
Attendance
With 725 attendees, 555 online sellers and 91 speakers, the conference was certainly a success. Everything ran on time, attendees were well fed, the content fresh and interesting and sponsors couldn’t have been happier with the foot traffic. For those attendees that missed a panel or two, PROSPER Show will be making them available via video in a few weeks time.
The future = PROSPER Show 2017
“The PROSPER leadership team is humbled by the feedback from our first-year show – when we designed our agenda of 34 presentations and competitive panel discussions, we were not sure if sellers would be interested in this level of intense, open discussion about key operational issues,” said James Thomson, President and Co-founder of PROSPER. “So, to see so many sellers rolling up their sleeves to get into the details of how to make specific improvements to their businesses, this energizes our team to develop more seller educational opportunities. Stay tuned for details of upcoming events!”
I, for one, am looking forward to next year. Congrats PROSPER Team
Tamebay Take
This sounds like a fantastic show for US Amazon sellers. Anyone serious about running their business should consider attending and from other feedback we got it was pretty good for exhibitors as well.
Is it worth the trip from the UK? That’s a stretch as much of the content relates to Amazon.com and we’re not sure just how well it translates to the UK. However there’s definitely space for a similar Amazon focused event in the UK and currently there’s nothing that comes even close to the PROSPER Show.
