Salgal48
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posted on June 30, 2003 02:50:38 PM new
Personally it has been a wonderful site. I wonder why other "start-ups" or experienced sites like Amazon and Yahoo don't look into buying Half? Even though Ebay owns it, they could sell it right?
Ioffer seems to be the only site that's ready to compete against Ebay. I would much rather support Ioffer because of that.
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AuctionAce
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posted on June 30, 2003 05:36:06 PM new
It's a real mystery as to what will become of Half. Many of the items can be blended in but not that many. I'm positive that they are not going to let tens of millions of listings merely leave the site after paying a lot of money for Half three years ago. They must have a plan but are not revealing it at all.
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stonecold613
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posted on June 30, 2003 08:45:19 PM new
Why won't somebody buy Half.com?
At the moment, there are too many legal problems with the half.com format. Maybe down the line it may become the standard, but for now is too risky for anyone to go that route.
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AuctionAce
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posted on June 30, 2003 09:06:07 PM new
What's the difference between Half and Amazon Marketplace or whatever the used book section is called?
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stopwhining
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posted on July 1, 2003 01:10:12 PM new
amzn marketplace charges 15% commission and a 99 cents transaction fee and amzn keep 1/3 of the customer shipping fee.
not too many people hear of half.com.
many books listed on half,com do not have photos.
amzn expects the marketplace sellers to have the book on hand and ship within 2 days while on half,you have to wait to hear from the seller to confirm the sales.
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AuctionAce
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posted on July 1, 2003 01:30:37 PM new
I know that but what I meant was what is the difference liability-wise as in Stonecolds post?
**************8
Why won't somebody buy Half.com?
At the moment, there are too many legal problems with the half.com format. Maybe down the line it may become the standard, but for now is too risky for anyone to go that route.
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stopwhining
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posted on July 1, 2003 02:55:47 PM new
so what are the liabilities of half.com??except poor sales??
this hyping of IOFFER is getting kind of old,why dont you list some one dollar bill at 59 cents first.
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AuctionAce
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posted on July 1, 2003 04:18:51 PM new
There was some mentions about Half and the Half model/format in the lawsuit over the recent ebay patent infringement lawsuit. I think that is what Stonecold meant.
I personally haven't been hyping ioffer ( other that the hotdamn GREAT free store w/ shopping cart! ) and my post today about the ioffer seller that listed tons of multiple Masonic art prints listings is a sort of anti-hype. 
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stopwhining
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posted on July 2, 2003 06:52:20 AM new
i recall when they first bring out half.com ,it said books must be listed at half the price of the listed price.
selling books is not a particularly profitable business,full time booksellers have a hard time scraping by with barnes and noble and amzn cutting prices,now they have to compete with amateur who list books at one penny to make money on shipping.
Ebay is a publicly held company and must report their results to the shareholders,half is a drainer,it is not profitable and it should be shut down,it is just good business 101.
someone is paying for all that bandwidth and the customer service staff of half and these expenses should be covered from the revenue and it is not covered.how much can you make getting 15% of a book listed at 99 cents,so half is making some money from shipping,big deal,try to meet the payroll and office rent and the computer setup??
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AuctionAce
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posted on July 2, 2003 08:16:35 AM new
The last set of financial records I saw on the Net said the 16% of ebay's revenue comes from the Half operations so it's not a drain. Half started with a penny minimum price on books but raised it to a 75 cent minimum a few years ago. Half sells much more then books now and many are fairly expensive items.
In the begining I think none of the books were allowed to be priced over half of the list price but that quickly went away as they rapidly expanded into older out of print books.
If I owned Half and the lawyers said that I didn't have to sell it because of the lawsuit then I'd raise the minimum price to at least $4 of any item on the site. That's at least 60 cents profit per purchase for Half ( plus the s/h overage ). I'd do the same thing on ebay. There must be at least a million items a week that sell under $2 or $3 and ebay only gets a 5.25% FVF on these items plus the 30 cent listing. Ebay could create a $5 or less and everything is Fixed Price web site or section of ebay with nickel listings and a flat 75 cent FVF on those items. Let the little non-ebay sites have the cheapo items.
Should ebay really mess around with sub $5 items? That's where they probably lose money or make very little.
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stopwhining
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posted on July 2, 2003 03:58:54 PM new
16 % of the total ebay revenue,it does not say what percentage is expenses??
i can say my resturant business brings in 20% of my sales,but its expense is 25%.
not all businesss ideas are brilliant,not all are high margin business,it is not a crime to exit low nargin ,low prospect business.
bookselling used to be a respectable business ,booksellers are genteel educated people who love books,now with all that discounting,where is the beef??
dont forget books are heavy,so bookseller pay more for shipping.
if you have a brick and mortar store,you need traffic and rent in such area is not cheap either.
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Salgal48
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posted on July 2, 2003 04:01:38 PM new
Auction Ace: You make a lot of sense. There should be minimums on all the sites. I think 99cents is a ridiculous price to sell a book or CD, which is what happens on Half and Amazon.
I sell all my stuff on Half.com and get more action Amaz for the books. For example this past 2 weeks, I sold 3 items from Half, and 1 from Amazon.
Half takes ANYTHING "everything else" including soap. I have belt buckles, CDs, books, laserdiscs, computer parts.
Their commission is competitive and you're right Amaz charges too much, but Amaz like Ebay is the big gorilla, you can NOT list on their site.
I think Amaz is falling out of favor though.
They still haven't turned a profit. They would do well to steal some of Ebay's employees.
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stopwhining
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posted on July 2, 2003 04:22:09 PM new
amzn still allows seller to list books at one penny.
amzn claims that they are discounting books to build their brand name,they look upon the loss as their marketing expense,this is straight from the horse's mouth-jeff bozo.
more people know amzn than half,only the savvy bargain hunters know of half.com
where do you ever see advertisement for half.com??
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Salgal48
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posted on July 5, 2003 03:51:00 PM new
Half.com is being merged into EBAY now. Under Manage Inventory, I notice that when I issue a refund or confirm/cancel an order, it's at the EBAY site.
So they are making small steps to move functions to Ebay.
Not happy, Because Half.com has its distinct users/buyers/sellers and we don't want to become part of the bigger broader territory that is Ebay.
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stopwhining
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posted on July 5, 2003 04:23:14 PM new
if they merge into ebay,how would the seller be billed??it cant be free,nothing is free on ebay.
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Salgal48
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posted on July 5, 2003 04:44:48 PM new
They would definitely lose me, because I don't like the pay before it sells method. You can be out $$$ with the BuyItNow and the auction listings. It only helps if you're selling large, collectible items, not small items. if Ioffer was smart they would put as much money into marketing as Ebay does and give them a run for their money.
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AuctionAce
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posted on July 5, 2003 07:40:58 PM new
There are only two main difference between ebay and Half and those diferences both must be addressed before a complete merger occurs.
1) no listing fees at Half with a different FVF rate. I have no clue as to how ebay will pull that off. One way to retain a lot of the millions of soon-to-be-orphaned listings is to permanetely lower the listing fee on items under $10. Millions of listings would still go away but millions would stay, at least for a while.
2) Collection of payment by Half. Can ebay try this on some of it's auctions? If they do it will be with the PayPal auctions and it will be exactly what AuxPal/Bidville proposed 2.5 years ago and Paypal decided against. +++ ( History lesson, a new online auction proposed to Paypal that an auction format be established where every bidder & seller was PP registered and every auction would be paid instantly with PP funds from the buyer )
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"Sometimes I think war is God's way of teaching us geography." - Paul Rodriguez
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stopwhining
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posted on July 5, 2003 08:16:57 PM new
if ebay has double standards for half and ebay items,then why not keep half??
half is a loser,everyone knows it,amzn is the one who is squeezing others out,it wants barnes and noble,border and half out.
how many harry potter books did half sell??
the big sellers on half also sell on amzn,they also have their own website,dont cry for them,they will be around-like hamilton, powells,strandbooks, abebooks.
do you know E R HAMILTON has it own website and you can get the same book for less on its own site than on amzn,because it does not have to fork over 15% to amzn.
It also sells on half,the books which it cannot unload.
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AuctionAce
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posted on July 5, 2003 11:06:23 PM new
According to the recent press articles about the ebay patent infringment lawsuit Half will have to go ( catchy saying ).
I think Amazon is way overblown and it is barely making a profit. When the internet was young Amazon was the main place to buy stuff. They totally blew their window of opprotunity and now they are barely making a profit after years and years of huge loses. Amazon could go belly up when investors get tired of waiting.
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"Sometimes I think war is God's way of teaching us geography." - Paul Rodriguez
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Salgal48
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posted on July 6, 2003 01:11:33 AM new
Don't think Amazon is making a profit; where did you read they were making a profit? They've never made a profit.
Agreed, Amz is way overblown, and by trying to conjoin with other companies like Target it's not helping the bottom line.
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replaymedia
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posted on July 6, 2003 07:28:01 AM new
Half.com isn't for sale. It makes too much money for eBay. They will be merging it with the eBay site next summer.
They've made lots of neat new changes and improvements over the past few months, and are definitely looking better all the time.
I will agree that the FREE part won't last.
I WILL NOT pay per-item listing fees there. No way. No chance. Not at all. I have too many items that don't sell terribly well on Half.
I would be willing to pay for it under certain conditions. Maybe a flat monthly fee like Amazon charges for their Pro Merchant People or a slightly higher FVF. A flat monthly membership fee would keep out a lot of the true penny-sellers and low-end hobby sellers. This would be a good thing for more serious sellers.
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AuctionAce
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posted on July 6, 2003 07:36:05 AM new
Amazon financial sheet
http://biz.yahoo.com/fin/l/a/amzn.html
Looks similar to ebay's with 270 million profit to ebay's 250 million profit but ebay projects a $3 billion profit soon.
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A flat rate monthly fee may keep a few sellers. What are the options? Move to Amazon? Abe's books or Bookfinder.com? I bet that ebay is willing to blow of the cheapo book sales at half.
Half.com article
http://www.auctionbytes.com/cab/abn/y03/m06/i09/s03
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"Sometimes I think war is God's way of teaching us geography." - Paul Rodriguez
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