Wrapping up the 2010 eCommerce Summit

Doba's Tradeshow Booth

We attend dozens of online retail industry conferences and tradeshows throughout the year. Pick a month – any month – and you’re likely to find one or more of our staff members attending an industry event where we either have a chance to meet and greet customers just like you, or where we ourselves are presented with an opportunity to further our own professional development. As a result, we tend to live ‘outside of the vacuum’ that most businesses dwell in. Rather than keep to ourselves and act as if we know all the answers, we’re constantly striving to improve by meeting with customers face-to-face, and by learning from others in our field how to be better ourselves.

Along with eBay, PayPal, Yahoo, and Overstock.com, Doba was one of the primary sponsors of this past week’s eCommerce Summit in Las Vegas, Nevada. The event is an annual convention and tradeshow hosted be the eCommerce Merchants Trade Association and the Professional eBay Sellers Alliance (PESA).

This year’s Summit gave us a chance to interact with up-and-coming online retailers and learn about exciting new trends shaping the eCommerce industry. As you would expect, we interacted with retailers who use Doba’s online product sourcing solutions, including Syed Raza, a Doba member who attend the show free of charge thanks to our offer of free admission to the conference .

Syed Raza

In interacting with Syed, we learned that his online retail business is generating enough money that he’s able to leave his full-time job as a director of education at a college. When we asked him if online retail is now his full-time job, he was unsure how to answer, as he said his online business only requires a couple of hours of his time each day.

Like many of you, Syed sources his products exclusively through drop ship suppliers, and Doba’s products represent about 45 percent of his virtual inventory. Syed is working on setting up a dedicated online store, but for now is seeing tremendous success selling products on Buy.com, eBay, Amazon, and Sears.