EBay closing Half.com
 

Closing by the end of 2004.


http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmp...m/tech_ebay_dc

Atleast the items will be merged onto eBay, but I think this sucks. I like the way half.com works, and I will miss its ease of use. I hope books will sell as easily (and that I'll be able to buy them as easily) on eBay as they have on half.com!

That is kind of a bummer, sometimes you can find cool stuff on half.com, and you dont have to wait for an auction to close and all that stuff.

More and more, eBay had been pushing "Buy It Now" kind of transactions. Stores have been putting up things at a set price, with no bids.

From the article, it sounds like that's what they're doing here... just integrating the Half stuff onto eBay at a set price. Shouldn't be much different actually, just all in the same place rather than 2 different sites.


Personally, I've found Half to be pretty useless as soon as they stopped listing stuff at half off. Soon, the place was flooded with merchandise that was brand new and priced higher than retail stores... and there was no Advanced Search feature to list items by % off MSRP. I'm sure there were good deals there, but they were too hard to track down...

It looks like they want to use fixed price auctions to replace half, which sucks in my opinion. Occasionaly, I like selling stuff on half, because it's so easy compared to doing an eBay auction. If I want to do an eBay auction right, I've got to take pictures of the item, edit the pics, upload the pics, make an html description including links to the pics, list all of my terms, etc. Granted, after you've done it once, it may only take 10 minutes or so to do everything to get a good eBay auction up, but I can put something up on half in less than a minute.

Agreed--I've been listing on Half almost since the beginning, and that was one of the worst changes. I didn't have a problem selling cd's for six bucks, because I didn't listen to them anyway. I even emailed Customer 'Support' and asked for some sort of search or filter to show stuff at 50% MSRP, or even 75%....they said 'Good idea!' and I never heard anything about it. I haven't bought anything through them in at least three years [plus the fact that they never have coupons for non-new customers.]
That said, I have made about a thousand dollars from them, and I currently have about 70 items for sale there. I guess I'm a hypocrite, because I don't ask half MSRP, but I do try to be in the lowest three prices for the item's condition. Some things sell, some don't, but it's very convenenient to post stuff and just leave it there till it sells. I don't mind the commissin, because *usually* my commission and postage credit balance each other out.

I think the worst example was for a video game, Arc the Lad Collection....MSRP was 74.99, you could order directly from the manufacturer and get a free mouse pad, a free fob watch, and free FedEx shipping....some scuzzbag had it listed, three months before it came out, for 124.99.

I wonder how many of those limited edition Disney Treasures went straight to Half.com?

Anyway, like ebay, half.com is a great idea, imho, gang aft agley. Ebay has focused so much on the big sellers who sell stuff for .02 less than Best Buy has it for, the Buy it now, and it's lack of piracy control that it's not very fun anymore for a lot of items. I still browse, and very occassionally luck out, but it's less often than not.

The only thing about the transition of Half to Ebay, which may not be a big deal, is that even though Buy it now items are a specified price, they are still auction format, as far as I can tell, ie, it's only listed for a certain time frame, and you're charged if it sells or not. SO for my 70 items, unless they change it, I'd have to re-list each 7 or 10 days, which I'm not willing to do. The 15% commission is kinda high, but when I can leave things on there forever [I've had one item straggling along for about 2 years], it's quite reasonable [one newspaper ad would be about ten bucks, for instance, and the difference between my S/H allowance and the commission charge, over my tenure there, is only 60 cents, which is very reasonable.]

From a buyer's perspective, it looks like you can search for BIN items only, but you can't search filtering *out* BIN items.....For most of the BIN prices I see, I'd rather go to the store or an online store I'm familiar with and buy it there, than hassle with ebay.

I hate to see them do stuff like this, because I really do like ebay and half.com, and their concepts, but it seems like they're changing stuff just to change stuff. Maybe I'm seeming somewhat resistant to change, but most of the changes I've seen in the past couple years have been negative [at least for me.]

This sucks. I really like Half.com

This really does suck! I have had almost $4000 in sales there since the site opened up. Anybody know ay exact date on when the site is closing? I see many of my remaining items moving getting drastic sale prices soon.

At least I was able to sell off all my VHS tapes and pretty much all my Dad's VHS collection. It just sucks b/c when I can't trade a dvd or game, I just throw it on Half.com and it sells pretty quickly.

I love the ease of use of Half.com. I have never sold anything on Ebay since it always seemed like a pain to use.

I do agree that many of the prices stink snce they went to listing items that are not half price. The only good thing is that you can list out of print and hard to find items on the site now and get good prices for them instead of having to sacrifice them at half price of what they list (which was wrong a lot of the time) as MSRP.

I hope someone else rises up to take their place. I guess I need a course on how to sell something on Ebay soon. Damn Ebay. :(

The article isn't really clear, will you still be able to just list items and not watch them? My wife and I sell stuff on half and ebay all the time for madmoney, but we like the "post and forget it" function of half.

This is the reason that I use Half.com ... so, so easy. Two weeks later, I get an e-mail... "Hey, cool, I sold something!" But in the meantime, I don't have to think about it.

I'm guessing they will take half's ease-of-listing function and incorporate it into ebay. Otherwise it will be impossible for the power seller to list their thousands of books, CDs, and DVDs...

You know, if they do a thing where they integrate the catalog of half.com, with the option to either do a fixed price sale or a regular auction, it could really be an improvement.

I tried to look for an email addy on half.com, but couldn't find a thing.

I don't really care. For the past few years, everything I've found on Half has been way overpriced. I've only found one or two things that was a decent price. Ebay has the buy-it-now feature, and I've found far better deals there, even with buy-it-now.

There's always the Used option on Amazon.com- fees are almost exactly the same as Half anyways.

That sucks but at least they are giving plenty of notice. I still have about an entire year to sell what I have up.

Oh Man! I love this place! This is where i buy and sell all my stuff. Bummer. :( At least we still have a whole year to go.

And i doubt that we'll see coupons for ebay if they close half.com.

This totally sucks. While it's true that prices in general have really increased at half.com over the years ("Half twice the retail!"), I did like the ease of buying there, being able to just pick something up without hovering over my computer like a fool until the last second to snipe.

The article doesn't really say WHY they're closing it. Weird. As for merging the items into ebay, I know there have been more & more BIN-type deals there, but a "fixed price auction" is by its very definition NOT an auction. Sometimes auctions are cool; other times they're a hassle not worth the trouble. I for one wish half.com was NOT going away...

Over the weekend I thought I would give half.com a try because of some of the posts here and man was it easy to list things to sell. The items have to be commodity in nature (textbooks, VHS, DVD) but it beats listing every dvd I want to sell individually on Ebay. I'll still use Ebay for other items that require more selling and description but Half.com will be handling everything else.

This sucks!

as for selling, half blows ebay away. the layout of the site could have been better but overall it is much easier to use than posting an auction. I have made quite a bit off half. So end of 2004? That is still a long ways away.

Exactly. No muss, no fuss. I'm very sure I don't want to mess with auctions. So now where? Amazon?

I've looked into Amazon, and if it's a choice between ebay and Amazon, it'll be Amazon, but like usual, Amazon is more expensive and time consuming:
Half.com's commission up to 50 dollars, I believe, is 15%. Amazon charges 15% PLUS 99 cents.
And they say they only list items for 60 days, then they'll take it down, send you an email, and allow you to repost it.
The only advantage I could see to Amazon is name recognition, and people going there looking for new items, and seeing the 'Buy it used!' section. But of course they weight the scales in their favor--I don't know, but I doubt, that the free shipping would apply to resale items, and as a buyer, that could affect my decision of where to purchase from.

I don't know how easy Amazon is easy to use, but I also like the easy of Half.com....I'll find something on my shelves, a CD, DVD, or book, wander over, type in UPC/ISBN, pick a price, and forget about it. I can't imagine Half.com was losing money with a 15% commission for simply hosting a bunch of pictures and credit card info.

Count me in as one who is sorry to see them go. I'm not a power-seller, but if I want to get rid of something, I like going through Half.com. You just "Fire and Forget," and most of the time my items sold very quickly.

For buyers, it's a lot easier to navigate as well, since you can see ALL listings for a particular item in one place and not have to worry if somebody spelled it differently or get hits on items you aren't interested.

Yep, I never sold too much stuff and when I did, I just dumped it off to Half and forgot about it. It was always nice to find an email from them saying you made a sale.