Summary: About 10 years or so ago I was working at the bookstore and I had just been promoted and given the responsibility of organizing the e-commerce operations for the company. Our company had its own distribution warehouse and it was designed to send one massive order to each store every week. It was not at all designed to send several small orders to customers all over the country every day.<br> <br> We knew that it would take a lot of work to scope out the features of the website, build the databases, design the front end, design and connect all of the APIs and hooks into our inventory management system, and many other things that would be necessary before we could start selling online. We decided that while that stuff was being done, we could go ahead and generate some income and learn some operational procedures by selling on third party marketplaces like eBay and Amazon.<br> <br> Amazon had a third party sellers conference each year and we thought it would be good for us to attend. Since I’d only been at my current position for about 3 months and I was working closely with the president of the company, we decided that both of us would attend the conference.<br> <br> I had never been to Seattle before, or anywhere in the Pacific Northwest for that matter. I was really looking forward to the trip. I had mixed feelings about traveling with the company president. On one hand, he and I got along really well and had a good rapport, on the other hand, I was apprehensive about it. I didn’t know if he ever took the tie off and relaxed, or if he would be working the entire time we were there. I wanted to see a few things while we were there, but I knew that business duties had to come first. Read More...
