jsharma

Has any other seller at half.com experienced a dramatic slump in sales at half.com? I sell DVDs at the site and the orders have suddenly dried up. I can't come up with any explanation except perhaps the fact that NetFlix is dumped their rental DVDs at the site. Maybe that's it. Anyone else out there with similar grief?

darkside

I have had great success selling electronics, videos, and CDs. However, my DVDs have not sold. I think the netflix thing might have something to do with it. My DVDs were listed at the cheapest price for like new, but still didn't sell.

happypants

It's getting warmer so people are out doing stuff vs. sitting in front of the computer. Probably be slow till the fall.

BigT

I've done ok - seems normal to me. I lowered my price on a couple slow-sellers and, bingo, they went right away. I don't know about your cases, but I have noticed that a lot of dvds are grossly overpriced. Many I can purchase at Best Buy for the same price or even less. Plus, I'd say that the "Buy It Now" feature on Ebay had to take some sales away.

cineman

I've had a good run lately, I've sold 12 items in the last week!

hallospaceboy

yeah sales have been real slow for me.... Ive got videos up there mostly, some laserdiscs and a couple of dvd's....


which by the way , has anyone who sells laserdiscs been having a problem with confirmations being sent as DVD?
I know ive listed as a laser but the email comes thru as a dvd listing....


let me know

thebear

Half.com is way out of control... what do they have, over 15 million items now? Anytime I go to sell something, there's like 50 other people selling it too.

Petoff

I just posted three DVDs there and they sold within 2 days so I say there isn't any trouble. Broken Arrow, Englishman..., and Tao of Steve. The key is to price is reasonably.

Like it was said above, there are WAY TOO MANY items selling for only 5-10% off retail. Who wants to buy at Half.com at those prices. I price around half off list or a buck or two more. Since I've watched the movies already and got a good deal on them to begin with I don't mind at all making this money back. I think many people have DVD titles on their wish list and get emails when the price meets THEIR criteria so that is why they sold so quickly. Just keep an eye on your selling price!

Jack Straw

Things should begin to pick up. They just put out about 10 new coupons ($5 off $10, 10 off $50) that have been posted in the "Bargains" section. Just this weekend, I picked up about 8-9 DVDs to add to my collection.

ipkevin

Why don't you guys try listing on http://www.switchhouse.com ? That way, you can open yourselves up to all us Canadians!

Half.com pisses me off! They don't ship to Canada and they prevent anyone from contacting the sellers without bidding. Canadians are missing out on a lot of good deals on half.com. And it looks like their sellers could use the sales!

GretzkyScores!!!

the best times of the year for sales is christmas. my sales have dried up a bit so i slashed prices and voila!

DVDealer

Probably that period a couple of weeks ago where the coupons were available to everyone got a lot of people buying then, but there's probably a lull period now after that run on titles. A lot of people probably got spoiled (me included) with the coupon discounts and are waiting to buy any more new ones until we watch the ones we bought and are hoping that the coupons get freed up again sometime soon after that.

The "average selling" price that are given as advice is probably misleading some sellers at times if there isn't much demand for a title. If someone comes in and pays a higher price than others are willing to this probably inflates the "average selling price" higher than it should be since the number of sales are too small a sample to be really accurate.

temptation

My experience with half.com has not been a good one. Moviesubuy has been the main culprit. I ordered 3 DVDs from them and they were supposed to be 'factory sealed' copies. They arrived 'sealed', but it seems the people at moviesubuy have access to a shrinkwrapper and sealed the movies themselves. The discs were scratched so badly they either wouldn't play or would pixellate at certain points in the movie. I have bought other DVDs from half.com and perhaps I've been unlucky, but I find the sellers rather dishonest. This is only my experience but it has definitely put me off buying through half.com.

Music

I'm sure there are quite a few DVD Talk users that are selling their goods on half.com - you just have look at the feedback rating or match the name used here to the name used on half.com . My seller name on half.com is MrMusicDVD

foxdvd

As a buyer, I get mad when I see a used DVD for more then a new one can be bought online. The only reason people use it now is because of the coupons, but it is going to get to a point when those are gone, and it will get REALLY hard to sell used dvds at new prices....

TexasGuy

I've also had a bad experience from 'Moviesubuy'. They sent me a DVD scratched so badly it wouldn't play. They are definitely on my list of sellers to avoid, even though their rating remains high (4.6/5.0). Maybe we should create a DVDTalk thread devoted to dishonest Half.com sellers, since Half.com obviously can't or doesn't want to stop this dishonest seller.

Overall, I'm mixed in my satisfaction of Half.com. I've gotten some good deals there, but 4 out of my 14 total purchases there have been bad experiences. One sent me a demo disc, one (Moviesubuy) was scratched too bad to play, one was scratched badly, but played fine, and another sent me an import that didn't match the UPC code of my purchase.

I've almost decided it isn't worth it to buy at Half.com anymore. I browsed through the 20 titles on my "wish list", and every one is selling for only a buck or two less than online retail pricing, and five are selling for more than retail. These aren't OOP or hard to find titles, either. They are all in stock at major online retailers like Buy.com, Amazon, CDNow, etc. Given that 29% of my purchases have been bad deals, I certainly won't pay that close to retail, even with a coupon.

DVDealer

I guess what makes this more irritating is that on your wish list there it shows up as "in stock" when you have these kind of pointless offerings, but on the wishlist itself, there isn't any "lowest price", so you wind up right clicking all of your entries to see if anything new has been posted when most of the time it's the SOS.

Half.com, if you would put that price in the wish list (or make it more clear how that it can be customized to do so), I bet people would be looking at their wish list more frequently (and it might increase # of sales that way too).

It would also help us unfortunate to having to use Memory management stupid Win98 which will have notorious Microsoft memory leaks cause things eventually go crash when opening up new windows through IE all of the time to check these prices.

Jadzia

I have noticed that too! I have had to confirm it was listed correctly (afraid a buyer might be mad at getting a LD) but I think it's fine. Must just be a glitch with the confirmation email.

klh

I agree. The prices on half are often a joke and who wants to get burned at half (a high probability) when you can walk into sam's club and get the DVD for the same price, or a buck or 2 more.

For me to buy anything on half, it has to be considerably less than new. I just got burned again last week (seller sent VHS instead of DVD) and I'm done with half for DVDs. I'll only buy music and only if it's a rare item or considerably less than a Djangos or Spun.

klh

As a seller, I now list CDs and DVDs at Amazon. I simply do not like doing business with half and am willing to give up the extra $.99 to amazon in order to contact buyers directly via email and resolve problems. I think bad sellers prefer NOT to have to contact buyers directly! I really wish Amazon would do away with the $.99 fee as it would put half out of business!