There was a lot of picture taking and fun this weekend as eBay On Location came to Atlanta and I was fortunate enough to go. Then we threw an after party in Downtown Atlanta called and the CEO of eBay came by and hung out with us!

Here is John Donahoe with my Mother ("Momma ICE") and myself last night at the Aftermath after party.

Here is a great picture with Marlene Gavins (The Savvy Seller), Richard Brewer-Hay (eBay Ink Blog), Randy Smythe (Buy.com), John Donahoe CEO of eBay, myself and Kat Simpson (Kat’s Kloset) from left to right, hanging out at the after party. Pictures courtesy of Karen Locker

I have SO MUCH video footage and content coming from this weekend that is unbelievable, up close and personal stuff. We are combing through hours and hours of coverage from the event so STAY TUNED all week long to ColderICE.com for the details!!!

As the title sponsor for the eCommerce Aftermath Event in Atlanta, I was fortunate enough to get an interview with the leadership at ProStores.com. ProStores is an eBay Company, they enable small- and medium-sized businesses to sell products and services online.

Prostores provides merchants everything they need to set up, design, and manage a customizable ecommerce storefront at their own Internet domain.

The ProStores product is based on StoreSense, an award-winning e-commerce software originally created by Kurant in 1998. eBay acquired Kurant and StoreSense, and in June 2005, they were re-launched as ProStores.

For multi channel sellers there are many advantages to choosing ProStores for your ecommerce solution – including tighter integration with the eBay marketplace and making it as easy as possible for all merchants to build their online businesses. If you are an online retailer and want to accelerate growth and profitability, ProStores is a complete ecommerce solution that helps merchants reach new customers and extend their brand online.

Listen to the Interview NOW!
(press play button and be patient, it takes a minute to buffer)

OR Click to Download

For eBay Sellers who are thinking about growing their business through an additional online sales channel, ProStores provides a complete ecommerce solution that allows sellers to manage both their eBay business and off-eBay sales from one central location.

Press "Play" to listen now

Be sure to subscribe so you do not miss an episode.

In my course of advising many small to medium ecommerce business I run across dozens of them that are actually operation "illegally"! I am surprised by the number of them that are in violation of state and local laws by not have a simple $20-$50 license. But worse than that, they limit their access to go quality wholesale opportunities because they are still running the business like a hobby….#FAIL folks!

Every business needs one or more federal, state or local licenses or permits to operate. Licenses can range from a basic operating license to very specific permits, (e.g., environmental permits).

Regulations vary by industry, state and locality, so it’s very important to understand the licensing rules where your business is located. Not complying with licensing and permitting regulations can lead to expensive fines and put your business at serious risk.

Federal Licenses and Permits

If your business is involved in activities supervised and regulated by a federal agency, you may need to obtain a federal license.

State Licenses and Permits

Many types of businesses need to obtain some type of business or professional/occupational license or permit from a state government. Choose a state to find out about specific license and permit requirements in the state where your business is located.

State Business License Offices

Tips for Maintaining Your Business License

• When signing up for a license, permit or registration, keep track of those that need to be renewed on a regular basis and keep a calendar of renewal dates.
• Maintain a copy of all licensing applications and forms in your business records.
• Make sure you follow rules for displaying your licenses or permits. Most states and localities require business to prominently display their business licenses so customers can see them.
• If you are thinking of expanding your business, whether it be expanding your building or launching a new product or service, you may need additional business licenses.

eBay On Location Atlanta Aftermath Party hosted by eCommerce Merchants Atlanta Chapter on Friday March 19th to attract many eCommerce rock stars and eBay sellers.

New York (PRWEB) March 17, 2010 — eCommerce Merchants Trade Association (Link), the leading trade association for online sellers, recently announces – The Aftermath: eCommerce Merchants Atlanta After eBay Party immediately following the eBay On Location event on Friday March 19th, 2010 at 8:00 PM at the very popular Stats sports bar only 2 blocks away. Admission is FREE but space is limited to the first 100 people.

Registration at: http://Aftermath.Eventbrite.com

"As a committed supporter of small business and the entrepreneurial spirit, ProStores is proud to be the title sponsor of the ECMTA’s ‘Atlanta Aftermath’ celebration. We are pleased to have this opportunity to connect with members of the eBay and online merchant community in-person," said Lin Shearer, Head of Marketing.

"eBay On Location and the ECMTA’s ‘Atlanta Aftermath’ are an ideal platform for our customers to get advice from industry experts on how to grow their businesses on eBay and online, to network and share their successes with other merchants, and to have a little fun," he added.

The Aftermath event is drawing "eCommerce Rock Stars" to attend. Confirmed guests include, John Jantsch – Duct Tape Marketing, Richard Brewer-Hay – eBay Ink Blog, Brent Leary – Customer Relationship Management, Toby Bloomberg – Diva Marketing Blog, Peggy Duncan – Personal Productivity Expert, Charles Lumpkin - Ecommerce SEO Strategist, "JB" Braitwaite – Internet Technology Expert, George Trantas – CEO Designer Athletic, Marlene Gavens – The Savvy Seller, Melinda and Kat – Co-Hosts of eBay and Beyond Radio, Cindy Shelby – Web Sellers Circle, and "Your Boy" John from ColderICE.com.

"Mixing the experts with the merchants in a relaxed environment and then encouraging them to interact and network is brilliant. This is "Social Networking 3-D" and I love listening, learning and participating. It’s like Twitter without the typing and you can have a drink…BRAVO!" John Lawson ColderICE.

eCommerce Merchants Trade Association recently opened 9 Local Chapters in Chicago, Dallas, Atlanta, San Francisco, New York, Los Angeles, South Louisiana, South Florida and Philadelphia. With more scheduled to be announced in the coming weeks. Local chapters are designed to deliver ecommerce education to merchants locally while reinforcing peer to peer networking with other online retailers.

ProStores is Platinum Sponsors for The Aftermath: eCommerce After Party! Along with these fine Gold Sponsors, thank you ALL!

ProStores, an eBay Company, offers a complete ecommerce solution that enables small- and medium-sized businesses to sell products and services online. We provide our merchants everything they need to set up, design, and manage a customizable virtual storefront at their own Internet domain.

Our product includes guided setup and template-driven design, a growing set of ecommerce features to drive sales and save time, help and support when you need it and full customizability for greater control.

ReplyManager is a web-based email management tool created to help eBay
Marketplace sellers manage high volume incoming email by integrating
directly to eBay’s Ask the Seller API and automatically organizing messages
into topic folders. It features customizable standard replies,
auto-responders, HTML text editing, SPAM controls PLUS unlimited users,
unlimited accounts and incredible reliability. eBay sellers can try
ReplyManager free for 15 days – no risk, no credit card required – and
sellers will always get a "real person" on the phone during normal business
hours call toll free at 877-848-1310.

AddOway helps you discover new, trustworthy people to buy, sell, bargain and trade with by going beyond the user IDs and email addresses to bring you a deeper look at the person you are dealing with. All users get a social profile with videos, pictures and blogs, as well as their own storefront to promote their products and services. Plus, users can easily connect their profiles to their Facebook, Twitter, external websites and more, to share their true identities and encourage other members of the community to interact with them on a deeper level than traditional e-commerce.

Designer Athletic – We are your Designer and Athletic online warehouse. We find great deals on shoes, apparel, and other great products and we pass the savings onto you. We hope you find what your looking for.

Paypal continues to show rapid growth and has been front and center on eBay earnings calls as the darling of its portfolio. Who is the LARGEST merchant of Paypal? Well that one is pretty easy, its the momma bear….eBay.

Yep, eBay makes more money and transactions for Paypal than any other single merchant on the platform. Everybody knows that one, right? Easy answer, that is almost a gimme question. But then I will ask you who is #2? What would you think is the #2 merchant for PayPal? Maybe you guessed it right off the bat, but I didn’t. I got it wrong and then heard the real answer and did a V-8 head slap. The second largest Paypal merchant is none other than Zynga, I know, crazy huh?!?

Zynga is a casual game developer located in San Francisco, California, United States. The company develops browser-based games that work both stand-alone and as application widgets on social networking websites such as Facebook and MySpace.

Zynga is probably best know for the Facebook games of Farmville, Fishville and Mafia Wars.

I know man, that is crazy when you really think about it. Did you know that according to Wikipedia  through 2009 Zynga makes its money from lead generation advertising and selling virtual health and gifts to game players. In 2009  Michael Arrington of Tech Crunch republished a video of a speech by Zynga CEO Mark Pincus.  In the speech, Pincus said:

So I funded [Zynga] myself but I did every horrible thing in the [face]book to, just to get revenues right away. I mean we gave our users poker chips if they downloaded this Zwinky toolbar which was like, I don’t know, I downloaded it once and couldn’t get rid of it. *laughs* We did anything possible just to just get revenues so that we could grow and be a real business.

—Mark Pincus, Speech from Startup@Berkeley

Please Follow Our YouTube Channel

Several days after the Techcrunch story, Zynga’s most recent Facebook game FishVille, was temporarily taken offline by Facebook on claim of advertising violations. According to Zynga, Fishville had 875,000 users within two days of launch.

Pincus later said that he had been too eager to increase company revenues through advertising, and that operating in reactive mode by taking down ads only after receiving complaints had not worked. The company removed all ads for a time, relying only on direct purchase of game currency, then began reintroducing third party ads only after they had been screened.

What is crazy to me is that this type of revenue seems to be somewhat "fleeting" at best. I know Facebook users like to play Farmville today but how long can Paypal expect that money to continue to flow in. Right now it is somewhat un-opposed as an alternate payment processor for Facebook games. But you got to think about all of the Paypal growth stories coming from John Donahoe on the earnings calls that you have heard. Personally, I was under the impression that Paypal was seeing large growth in ecommerce and online retail acceptance, come to find out, it is seeing most of its growth from Farmville, LMAO. I just found that revelation somewhat fascinating, don’t you?!?

Some times it is the story of the business man that is truly the most intriguing to me. Sure I like seeing your site, or oh how pretty your widget is, but ultimately it is the story behind the product that makes me so excited. I love nothing more than sitting and listening to the stories of successful entrepreneurs and what drives them.

I guess there is something that gets me giddy about ecommerce talk with those who are successful. I remember when we first started our business and all the "fun" we had. Its that shiny new smell I think I like. But that wears off, so how do I get my rejuvenation? I listen and talk to others about what they do and how they did it. That can energize you, that makes you believe in the American Dream and dammit, I want to live that dream and I know you do too.

So listen up as I sit down with a shoe king, his name is George Trantas and he is a true ROCK STAR of eCommerce! George Trantas who is the CEO of DesignerAthletic.com. He tells the story of the beginnings of his multi-million dollar business that he started on eBay. This is fascinating, inspiring and informative stuff.

George is now on of the LARGEST sellers on the eBay platform and he details how his business has grown from just one channel to a multi channel empire. Dude you GOTZ to check this one out!

TheFind Says to Merchants: ‘Feed Us Directly for Free!’

Straightforward Interface Gives Online Stores Control over their Window Displays in the World’s Largest Shopping Center

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif., March 15 /PRNewswire/ — TheFind, which hosts 17 million unique monthly shoppers and sends quality traffic to 150,000 stores, today introduced an enhanced feed spec and a new merchant center that allows online and local stores to submit their product feeds directly to TheFind, for free.  Most every merchant with their own online store is already in TheFind’s index; however, uploading a direct product feed to TheFind provides merchants of every size with a finer degree of control over how their products are presented, including the ability to update pricing more frequently and accurately specify information important for consumers such as tax and shipping charges. 

"When people search for products they are doing the online equivalent of window shopping," said Eric Peerless, chief marketing officer of Since1910 jewelers, the largest online seller of designer engagement rings, including the popular Tacori brand.  "Claiming my store, becoming an UpFront Merchant and submitting a feed directly to TheFind is a free and effective way of managing my product displays to invite more shoppers inside."

As the world’s largest shopping center, TheFind contains more than 500,000 online and local stores carrying over 400 million products.  TheFind assembles this comprehensive array of stores and products through a mix of patented web crawling and information extraction technology, in addition to the direct feeds it already accepts from many large merchants. 

Submitting a feed is easy, at merchant.thefind.com. Store owners must first "claim" their store and complete the basic store registration information.  Then, merchants can immediately begin submitting and directly managing their own product feeds to TheFind.  Merchants can use popular feed formats such as GoogleBase, or they can use TheFind’s new enhanced feed spec, which includes more detailed attributes relevant to a growing number of online shoppers.

In addition to direct management of how product information is displayed, the new tax and shipping tool highlights the re-launched merchant center.  In simplifying the task of compiling data for tax and shipping costs using simple radio buttons and drop down menus, merchants can quickly provide shoppers on TheFind with a greater level of transparency by specifying where and how they ship and in which states they collect sales tax.

"We wanted to make it as fast and easy as possible for merchants to get their feeds directly into TheFind, which is exactly why we are perfectly happy to receive the GoogleBase feed that many merchants are already using," said Jordan Keffer, director of merchant programs at TheFind.  "We also know – based on our own data – that existing feed specs don’t cover many of the product attributes consumers search for, so we’ve taken this opportunity to also define a new feed spec that better matches how shoppers actually search for products and stores."

Registering with TheFind and becoming an "UpFront Merchant," also a free service, allows merchants to provide buyers a greater degree of confidence by presenting easily located store detail information.  Importantly, UpFront merchants and merchants who submit their feeds directly to TheFind improve the quality of the store and product information consumers are seeking, thereby enhancing the relevancy of their product listings which typically increases the quality and quantity of the shoppers who visit their store from TheFind. 

Today during his talk at South by Southwest (SXSW) Twitter CEO Evan Williams announced the new @Anywhere platform for Twitter. Williams company pulled in more than $25 million last year with partnership with Google and Microsoft. Twitter has been the darling of the news and social networkers for the past year and a personal favorite of mine too.

The new @Anywhere platform will allow followers to interact DIRECTLY from a third party’s site without leaving that site. So guess who was on the list as an early adopter? eBay! Yep, you know eBay is down for whatever as long as you don’t leave their site, so this one is right up their alley…BRAVO!

Williams said he wants to help lower the barriers to adoption and now users can follow content from site providers without exiting their site. He said this will help sites gain more followers and have your fans on Twitter talk more about your content.

As you know I am a HUGH follower of all things social networking for business, I am going to be all over this stuff and hope to have more information as it develops. Until then, below is the blog post from Evan on the Twitter blog in full…

When we designed Twitter, we took a different approach—we didn’t require a relationship model like that of a social network. Keeping things open meant you could browse our site to read tweets from friends, celebrities, companies, media outlets, fictional characters, and more.

You could follow any account and be followed by any account. As a result, companies started interacting with customers, celebrities connected with fans, governments became more transparent, and people started discovering and sharing information in a new, participatory manner.

We’ve developed a new set of frameworks for adding this Twitter experience anywhere on the web. Soon, sites many of us visit every day will be able to recreate these open, engaging interactions providing a new layer of value for visitors without sending them to Twitter.com. Our open technology platform is well known and Twitter APIs are already widely implemented but this is a different approach because we’ve created something incredibly simple. Rather than implementing APIs, site owners need only drop in a few lines of javascript. This new set of frameworks is called @anywhere.

When we’re ready to launch, initial participating sites will include Amazon, AdAge, Bing, Citysearch, Digg, eBay, The Huffington Post, Meebo, MSNBC.com, The New York Times, Salesforce.com, Yahoo!, and YouTube. Imagine being able to follow a New York Times journalist directly from her byline, tweet about a video without leaving YouTube, and discover new Twitter accounts while visiting the Yahoo! home page—and that’s just the beginning. Twitter has proven to be compelling in a variety of ways. With @anywhere, web site owners and operators will be able to offer visitors more value with less heavy lifting.

This is really a surprise, we don’t get too much mail from eBay so I was intrigued to see what was in the envelope(s). So I turned on the video camera to see what eBay had for me in the mail. This is a fun one and I had to share it with our blog readers. I bet you will be getting one too, let me know if you get one OK?

p.s. The audio is a little hot, that is not your PC, sorry guys…

Please Follow Our YouTube Channel

Who’s that guy with the reflective shades? Is he a cop? Nope, but he will give you a ticket if you move too slow with your delivery times, LOL. This guy is Randy Smythe and I need to introduce him to some in our audience and reacquaint him to others.

Since I got started in eCommerce I had always wondered who the big kahuna was behind some of the big sellers on eBay. Randy was one of those big name. Back in 2005 I bought this book by Scot Wingo called eBay Strategies. I was enamored with what Randy was doing with his business of Glacier Bay Video. Boy that was ages ago. But it was not until I began blogging and hosting my Podcast that I was fortunate enough to score an interview with him. Since then I have watch Randy go from eBay biz owner to Buy.com 3rd Party Marketplace Big Wig!

It is an amazing transition and what he now knows and has experienced is a complete transformation of greater experience and insight for eCommerce. Randy is mad cool and he "plays well with others" LMAO. But in all seriousness, you would be hard pressed to find another person in corporate ecommerce that has the experience, knowledge and understand as Randy does. For years now he has been keeping in tune with the pulse of the landscape and I am now fortunate enough to have his number in the rolodex … well my cell phone

Here is a FANTASTIC interview he did for our listeners. Also you should go back and listen to some of Randy’s other interviews you will learn much as I always do.

Listen to the Interview NOW!
(press play button and be patient, it takes a minute to buffer)

OR Click to Download

OR Subscribe to the ColderICE Interview series via iTunes 

Press "Play" to listen now

Be sure to subscribe so you do not miss an episode.