In the midst of October, several of the Clear Ads team traveled into Central London to attend the Seller Sessions live event. After a short journey, we were delighted to arrive at the David Game College where we were greeted by a mixture of familiar and new faces. This event spanned two days and was jam packed with informative content and networking.
Friday
On arrival, an abundance of food was provided to us at a VIP dinner. We had all been divided up and assigned random seats to help encourage networking and not all sitting together. Conveniently, food was staggered throughout the night in order to allow space for conversation and sharing of ideas.
It was fascinating to speak to a variety of people from the Amazon community, varying from small sellers to advertising experts. It was brilliant to be reunited with individuals we had met at previous events like Steve Simonson from Billion Dollar Seller Summit and Howard Thai from Signalytics.
One conversation ensued between Tom and a relatively new to the space pair of sellers who were testing the waters themselves. They had been learning how to run a successful Amazon business from online podcasts, webinars and courses. It was intriguing to understand how different individuals learn at all stages of the selling journey and compare experiences of the ever changing world that is Amazon.
After chatting away between mouthfuls for hours, the night came to an end and we hit the hay with high hopes for all we would encounter the next day.
Satur-day
The day kicked off with refreshments and a chance to network with people before the sessions started. We met current and past clients, catching up and discussing all things Amazon. Throughout the day we were keen to gift our new black t-shirts and hoodies, expanding our Clear Ads merch family!
Diving straight into the fresh new Amazon updates, Saturday was made up of seminars from start to finish with a catered buffet for lunch to break up the day. Following this, the last few seminars were more conversation and Q&A based, giving us an opportunity to have open discussion and bounce ideas around a room full of specialists.
Our account manager Sophie was on the panel for one of these Q&As, talking about manual vs automated agencies. This led to interesting questions of whether they can coexist, what are the pros and cons of both and their importance within the space.
(Sophie, third in from the left, participating in the Q&A as part of the panel)
Speakers
Although all speakers delivered great talks which had us scribbling notes like crazy, here are some of the highlight talks we recall.
Casey Gauss from Thrasio spoke very well on organic product ranking and top tips on how to do so, e.g. using large coupons of 60%+ off and other unorthodox practices. In addition, Steve Simonson talked on the ongoing issues with Chinese manufacturing and the ports affected by COVID, a factor the majority of the audience were unaware of. Also, Danny McMillan had a fireside chat with a team member from Thrasio talking about aggregators and how busy and competitive that space has become, an interesting medium for us to learn from.
Additionally, we were proud of our director, George Meressa, for delivering an amazing talk about Amazon DSP, how you can utilise it, and the mind boggling depth of the audience builder. This was received very well and gave a small snippet of how we use Amazon DSP for our clients to leverage sales.
One of the best insights we gained from the weekend was learning about the AMPD platform and how this has the potential to help sellers direct traffic from Google to Amazon listings, alongside bettering the attribution tracking. This is something that we are now trialling for a customer and are looking to implement for all clients in the future to provide them with more value.
Satur-night
After the event ended and our wrists ached from all the note taking, we went out for a team dinner at a Thai restaurant where we had various curries and sushi. The evening then saw us head to an afterparty at Patch East, which had been booked out especially for us.
The host of Seller Sessions, Danny, was even doing his own DJ set and we relished in a fun, carefree opportunity to party. With a constant flow of delicious cocktails and even more networking, a combination which led to very interesting conversations, we had an amazing time with many memories.
The whole weekend was a blast and our heads are aching from being engulfed with top quality Amazon knowledge. We can’t thank the Seller Sessions team enough for setting this up and being amazing hosts!
