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Textbook, Media Marketplace Half.com is Shut Down by Ebay

eCommerceBytes reports that one of the better sites for buying media online has shut down.

Excerpt:

Half.com officially closed on August 31st, and the URL now redirects visitors to eBay.com. Half.com launched in 1999 and catered to buyers of books, music, movies, and games. eBay acquired the fixed-price media marketplace in 2000 and came close to shutting it in October of 2004.

Why close it now?

Since the breakup of eBay Inc. in 2015, eBay is a much smaller company and is putting all of its limited resources for Marketplaces into Seller Hub and its Structured Data initiative. (Part of Half.com’s appeal had been its catalog approach that made it easy for sellers to list and easy for shoppers to find the item they were looking for.)

The thing about half.com was that all the listings were organized by first ISBN/UPC and then by quality. That made it really easy to find the textbook I wanted at the quality I wanted.

That site was a lot easier to use than any other marketplace for books (even Amazon), which is why I bought all my textbooks there when I was a college student.

And now it’s gone because Ebay didn’t like the competition from it subsidiary. They’re now directing visitors to shop at Ebay instead:

Half.com has closed. We are redirecting you to ebay.com, where you can find great deals on a wide selection of books, movies, music and more.

That’s not going to happen – not for me, anyway.

The problem with buying books on Ebay is that the site lists offers by sale rather than UPC/ISBN. There’s no easy way to compare all  the offers for, say, Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone and pick the seller with the optimum trade off between cost and quality.

That’s why I never bought books of any kind from Ebay but instead stuck to sites where I can comparison shop, and I can’t be the only buyer to have made that decision.

Do you suppose that Ebay management really can’t see that they just pushed media sales to Amazon, or do they not care?

image by Mike Knell

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Somewhat Positive News Coverage Somewhat Unlikely to Affect eBay (EBAY) Share Price | Daily Political September 5, 2017 um 12:54 am

[…] Textbook, Media Marketplace Half.com is Shut Down by Ebay (the-digital-reader.com) […]


Chris September 6, 2017 um 1:44 am

I think ebay did not care about half.com’s buyers or sellers. I’m completely disgusted with ebay and I will never buy anything from them again. They just forced many of their buyers and sellers to their competition.


Frank September 6, 2017 um 9:27 am

I know some resellers that stopped listing items on Half.com a few years ago because their items never sold. Nearly all sales come from Amazon.


Robert Nagle September 6, 2017 um 2:15 pm

Ironically, the prices on half.com were cheaper than Amazon and they offered discounts for shipping on multiple purchases by one seller (something Amazon is not doing). But their customer service was bad. Another thing is that Amazon is adept at hiding third party sellers in their customer interface. Amazon has an incentive to show you the kindle price but not the used price. This might make me more likely to purchase directly from Betterworldbooks though.


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