581: The Must-Attend Sessions at Sellers Summit 2025 : Here’s The Agenda

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The Sellers Summit 2025 agenda is a curriculum-based, tactical ecommerce lineup running May 6 to May 8 in Fort Lauderdale, capped at roughly 200 attendees, and every session is taught by an operator who is currently running the business they are teaching from. This year’s agenda covers sourcing outside China (with dedicated sessions on Made in USA, Mexico, and Vietnam), Meta ads that survive algorithm turmoil, TikTok Shop from the top seller we know personally, community-building for physical products, YouTube plus email as a growth engine, shoppable YouTube ads, ecommerce SEO in the AI era, and Klaviyo’s newest AI CRM features. My co-host Toni Herrbach and I broke down the full lineup on the show.

If you are trying to decide whether an ecommerce conference is worth the ticket, this post lays out what the agenda actually covers, why the format is different from typical Amazon-only events, and the specific sessions and roundtables that are usually rated highest by past attendees.

Below we cover the two masterminds, every confirmed 2025 speaker session, the roundtable format that most attendees say pays for the ticket by itself, and the practical selection criteria for picking an ecommerce event in general.

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Key takeaways

• Sellers Summit 2025 is May 6 to May 8 in Fort Lauderdale, capped at ~200 attendees, ticket prices rise every two weeks until the event.
• Two masterminds run on Day 1: the ecommerce mastermind (revenue floor: $250K+ or $1M+) and the content mastermind (open to any revenue level, focused on YouTube, TikTok, email).
• Confirmed sessions this year include Made in USA sourcing (Annette), Mexico and Vietnam sourcing (Jim Kenimer / Cosmos Sourcing), Meta ads pivots (Andrea), shoppable YouTube ads (Brett Curry), TikTok Shop (Tiffany), community building (Sally Wilson / Caterpillar Cross Stitch), YouTube plus email (Toni Herrbach), building an audience beyond Amazon (Chris Shaffer), AI for Amazon (Ritu), and ecommerce SEO in 2025 (Jeff Oxford).
• Klaviyo, Quiet Light, RPC (freight forwarding with Pam), and attorney Steve Weigler run one-on-one consult sessions at the roundtables. Most attendees say a single 30-minute consult pays for their ticket.
• Every speaker also hosts a roundtable so attendees can go deep on questions the mainstage did not have time for. Speaker roundtables are the most-cited reason people return.
• Focus of the event is diversifying off Amazon-only or off China-only, with real playbooks for building direct-to-consumer brand equity.

What is Sellers Summit and who is it for?

Sellers Summit is an intimate, curriculum-based ecommerce conference for physical-product sellers, capped at ~200 attendees, running its eighth year in Fort Lauderdale, Florida from May 6 to May 8, 2025. Unlike most ecommerce events that focus on inspirational stories or 50,000-foot advice, every speaker is deep in the trenches of an active ecommerce business.

It is not invite-only, despite persistent rumors otherwise. Anyone can buy a ticket. Most attendees already have a brand and are actively selling, but complete beginners are welcome and every year several attendees show up pre-launch with a product idea and use the mastermind to shape it.

Sellers Summit is one of the few ecommerce events that gives roughly equal weight to Amazon and to your own online store. Most competing conferences are Amazon-only. Given how competitive Amazon has become with overseas sellers, most Amazon-only operators we talk to want to diversify and simply do not know where to start.

How to choose an ecommerce conference (what to look for)

The single best filter for an ecommerce conference is whether the speakers currently run the businesses they are teaching from, versus consultants, agency reps, or paid keynote celebrities. Operator-taught curriculum tends to survive contact with reality; theater-taught curriculum does not.

The second filter is size. Events over 500 attendees make it almost impossible to have a real conversation with a speaker or another operator at your level. Small events (100 to 250) usually deliver more actual business value because the hallway conversations become the event.

The third filter is agenda publication timing. Sellers Summit locks the curriculum two to three months out. Toni recently signed up for a newsletter conference where the session lineup was not shared until the week of the event, which is common in the industry and a warning sign about how much thought went into the curriculum.

What is the Sellers Summit mastermind day?

The Sellers Summit mastermind runs on Day 1 (May 6, 2025) as a full-day hot-seat session for qualifying attendees. Groups of ten operators are matched by revenue level and non-competing industry, moderated by a designated mentor, and given the day to workshop each other’s biggest business problems over catered food.

Placement into groups is done by hand. The organizers spend the bulk of their conference-planning time matching personalities (introvert with introvert, extrovert with extrovert), ensuring nobody sells competing products in the same room, and pairing groups with the right mentor. It is the highest-touch part of the event.

Multiple past mastermind groups have kept meeting monthly or bimonthly for years after the event, entirely on their own. Running a business is lonely; getting into a room with nine other operators at your revenue level is often the first time you talk shop with peers who actually understand your problems.

Ecommerce mastermind vs content mastermind: which one to pick

Sellers Summit runs two parallel masterminds on Day 1: the ecommerce mastermind for operators at $250K to $1M+ in revenue, and the content mastermind for anyone (including pre-launch founders and multi-million-dollar sellers who want the content angle). The two masterminds cover different topics and pull different attendees.

The ecommerce mastermind goes deep on ecommerce operations: sourcing, shipping, margin, hiring, unit economics, and any messy operational challenge someone brings to the hot seat. One year an entire mastermind session ended up focused on shipping-cost reduction because every operator in the room had the same problem.

The content mastermind is now in its fourth year and focuses on YouTube, TikTok, email marketing, and community. Last year several million-dollar sellers deliberately picked the content mastermind over the ecommerce one because content was the bottleneck for their next growth stage. Some multi-founder businesses split up: one founder goes to the ecommerce mastermind, the other goes to content.

Sellers Summit 2025 speaker lineup and sessions

The confirmed Sellers Summit 2025 speaker lineup covers ten locked sessions across sourcing, ads, ecommerce SEO, TikTok Shop, YouTube, community, and Klaviyo AI, with several more sessions still being finalized. Every listed speaker also runs a Q&A roundtable so attendees can go deeper after the mainstage talk.

YouTube plus email as a growth engine (Toni Herrbach)

Toni is teaching how to use YouTube and email together to grow an ecommerce brand, using the specific launch playbook she is running for one of her clients right now with strong early results. It is aimed at operators who already have a small email list (5,000+ subscribers is enough) and want a repeatable YouTube launch process that feeds email conversions.

The framework is YouTube for top-of-funnel discovery and email to close the sale. She will walk through the launch mechanics, the cadence, and the specific email flows that convert YouTube-referred subscribers into buyers.

Shoppable YouTube ads (Brett Curry)

Brett runs an ecommerce YouTube ads agency and is teaching the shoppable YouTube ads format, which is YouTube’s answer to TikTok Shop-style in-video commerce. His roundtable is packed every year because he opens attendees’ Google Ads accounts on the spot and audits campaigns live.

Expect a session heavy on real campaign screenshots, the specific ad units to run, and what shoppable formats are converting best right now.

Community-driven ecommerce (Sally Wilson, Caterpillar Cross Stitch)

Sally runs Caterpillar Cross Stitch out of the UK. She sells cross-stitch kits and supplies and has built a community so tight that she runs her own live event for her customers, which is almost unheard of for a physical-product store at her size.

She is teaching how to build that community from scratch and how to convert community engagement into a defensible sales channel. Building community is the single hardest and most underused ecommerce moat, and community-driven brands survive price hikes and algorithm changes that kill ads-dependent brands.

Sourcing outside China: Made in USA (Annette) and Mexico/Vietnam (Jim Kenimer, Cosmos Sourcing)

Two dedicated sourcing sessions cover the two most-requested alternatives to China. Annette teaches Made in USA sourcing (particularly textiles) and how to keep unit costs from destroying margin. Jim Kenimer of Cosmos Sourcing covers Mexico and Vietnam manufacturing, including how to find factories, negotiate MOQs, and structure orders in countries that are less documented than China.

With tariffs and trade policy shifting, sourcing diversification is now a top-three concern for most physical-product sellers. These two sessions are likely to be among the most-attended of the event.

Meta ads that survive algorithm turmoil (Andrea)

Andrea has consistently driven strong ROI on Meta ads for seven years across every platform change. Her differentiator is she knows how to pivot when ads collapse. Her session covers a real case from last year: a client whose Meta ads tanked on Black Friday (worst possible timing), and how she diagnosed the issue and restructured the account into that client’s best December and January of all time.

Her talks are famously no-fluff, timeline-based, and directly implementable during the session itself. Bring a laptop.

AI for ecommerce operations (Ritu)

Ritu had the most-praised session at Sellers Summit 2024, teaching specific ways to use AI in Amazon and DTC operations. She has a technical background (as does her partner Bernie) and uses AI to automate a wide range of ecommerce tasks. Her 2025 topic is not fully locked yet, but based on last year’s response, expect standing-room only.

Building your own audience beyond Amazon (Chris Shaffer)

Chris Shaffer has run brands on Amazon, Etsy, Shopify, and DTC, and consulted as fractional CMO for several others. His 2025 session is on building audience and selling on your own terms so you are not 100 percent dependent on Amazon. He covers SEO, social media, community, and the channel-mix logic that lets a brand shift ad spend between channels as costs move.

His Q&A sessions are legendary. Someone will ask an obscure question and he answers with a specific case study he ran in 2023.

Ecommerce SEO in the AI era (Jeff Oxford)

Jeff specializes exclusively in ecommerce SEO, which is rare (most SEO agencies are horizontal). His 2025 session covers what has changed with Google’s AI-driven updates and how to still get product pages and category pages to rank. He always presents a case study inside the talk and does live SEO audits at the roundtable afterward.

For anyone who has ever been burned by an SEO agency, Jeff is the exception that proves the rule. The ecommerce SEO industry is largely scammy; his approach is data-driven and rooted in what actually moves ecommerce revenue.

TikTok Shop from a top seller (Tiffany)

Tiffany is one of the top-earning TikTok Shop sellers we know personally and is completely transparent about her numbers within TikTok’s terms of service. Past sessions have included live selling walkthroughs that led multiple attendees (including my wife Jen) to launch their own live-selling programs afterward.

Her session is part teaching and part stand-up comedy, and even attendees who have no interest in selling on TikTok fight for seats because of the delivery. Whatever she is working on next, she will show it.

Klaviyo AI CRM features (Klaviyo team)

The Klaviyo team is running a session on the AI features from their newly announced Klaviyo Data Platform, including AI Forecast segmentation, the new campaign builder, the Action Center recommendations, and the customer-service hub. This is the same set of features Toni and I covered in a recent episode after attending Klaviyo’s launch event.

If you are already using Klaviyo for email or SMS, this session shows the features you probably do not know exist yet and how to actually turn them on.

Why the roundtables are the highest-ROI hour of the conference

The Sellers Summit roundtables are one-hour, hosted sit-downs where every speaker sits at a marked table and attendees rotate through to ask any question they want. Most attendees report a single 30-minute conversation at a roundtable pays for the whole ticket.

Every speaker at the event runs a roundtable, so the deep-dive you couldn’t get during the 40-minute mainstage session happens here. Last year one attendee sat down next to Brett Curry, opened their laptop, and had him do a live audit of their Google Ads account on the spot.

Sponsor roundtables carry equal weight. Klaviyo sends product people (not PR reps) who will open your account and fix flows on the spot. Quiet Light advisors run free consults for anyone thinking about selling or buying an ecommerce business.

RPC’s Pam handles freight forwarding questions in real time. She once got an attendee’s stuck container delivered in three days after their existing forwarder ghosted them. Ecommerce attorney Steve Weigler sends a calendar invite ahead of the event where you can book a 30-minute IP and trademark consult for free.

Frequently asked questions

When and where is Sellers Summit 2025?

Sellers Summit 2025 runs May 6 to May 8, 2025 in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. Tickets are capped at approximately 200 attendees and have sold out every year for the past eight years. Ticket prices rise every two weeks until the event, so earlier is cheaper.

Is Sellers Summit invite-only?

No, Sellers Summit is not invite-only and has never been invite-only. Anyone can buy a ticket at sellersummit.com. Beginners are welcome, and pre-launch founders attend every year and use the content mastermind to shape their product idea.

Do I need to have an existing store to attend?

No. You do not need an existing store to attend Sellers Summit. Most attendees have an active brand, but complete beginners and pre-launch founders are welcome. If you are pre-launch, the content mastermind is usually the better fit than the ecommerce mastermind.

What is the difference between the ecommerce mastermind and the content mastermind?

The ecommerce mastermind requires $250K+ or $1M+ in annual revenue and covers ecommerce operations (sourcing, shipping, margin, hiring). The content mastermind has no revenue requirement and covers YouTube, TikTok, email marketing, and community. Both run as ~10-person hot-seat sessions on Day 1 with catered food and a designated mentor.

Will the sessions be too advanced for a beginner?

Sessions at Sellers Summit are pitched slightly above the average attendee’s level on purpose, because beginner content is already free on YouTube and in most ecommerce courses. The value of an event is hearing the cutting-edge strategies working right now, which beginners can then implement several years ahead of the market.

Are there roundtables to ask speakers questions directly?

Yes. Every Sellers Summit speaker runs a roundtable in addition to their mainstage session, and attendees can go to the roundtable and ask any question they want, get a live account audit, or dive deeper into topics the speaker did not have time to cover on stage. Sponsors (Klaviyo, Quiet Light, RPC, attorney Steve Weigler) also run roundtable consult sessions.

What kinds of speakers present at Sellers Summit?

Sellers Summit only invites active operators who currently run the ecommerce business they are teaching from. Speakers include physical-product founders, agency owners who run active client accounts, ecommerce attorneys, freight forwarders, and platform product teams (like Klaviyo). It deliberately avoids consultants or paid celebrity keynote speakers.

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