Within the last one or two months, I’ve started receiving emails from several readers asking about a book I wrote some time ago about selling books on Half.com and what my thoughts are regarding selling books on Half.com vs Amazon.

Since one, or both, questions are being asked with increasing frequency, I thought it would be worthwhile talking about both here.

Selling Used Books Online - How To Sell Common Everyday Books On Half.Com Like Crazy!

WOW! Until people began asking about it one or two months ago, I hadn’t thought about this book in years. If memory serves me correctly, I wrote this in either 1999 or the very first part of 2000 (this was some time ago, and I’m writing this from memory, so this and subsequent dates may be off by a year or so).

At the time Half.com hadn’t yet been acquired by eBay and there were frequent questions about how to get started selling on Half.com on several book and eBay related forums and news groups. I’d been selling used books on Half.com for some time, and the book was written as a beginner’s guide to getting started on Half.com.

Somewhere around the middle of 2000 eBay purchased Half.com. A year or two later, there were rumblings coming out of eBay that they intended to shut down Half.com as a stand-alone site and incorporate it into eBay. In essence, this would have meant that individuals selling books on Half.com would have two options - either change to the regular eBay auction format or move their book business to one of the other book-selling sites such as Amazon, AbeBooks, etc.

This would have instantly made much of the book out-of-date and without a market to sell it to. I decided get what money I could out of it before this happened, and listed the entire thing on eBay. I sold the domain, the sales site, the book and the copyright to it to someone for a fair-sized chunk of change. As part of the sale, I signed an agreement stating I would not write and market another book about selling books on-line for five years.

In the end, when eBay officially announced their plans, they received so many angry complaints from Half.com sellers, they backed down and left Half.com as a stand-alone book selling sight and it remains so today.

Is the book worth purchasing today? To be honest, I can’t say for sure. If the party that purchased it from me has up-dated it to keep abreast of the book selling market, it may be. If not, than much of the information it contains is out-of-date. I did just look at the sales letter and virtually nothing has been done with it since I sold the sight. It is almost exactly the same. Whether to book is also, I don’t know.

Currently, if someone asks me to recommend a good book about selling books on-line, I recommend they buy a copy of Steve Weber’s “The Home-Based Bookstore” which can be purchased on Amazon if anyone is interested in reading it.

Half.Com vs Amazon

I haven’t sold anything on Half.com for four or five years so I can’t fairly compare it against Amazon.

When I started selling books anywhere other than on eBay I looked at both Half.Com and Amazon. For reasons that I don’t remember today, at the time it appeared that Half.com would be easier to list books on so that’s where I started my book selling adventures. I used them exclusively for six months to a year and then began using Amazon as well.

I stopped using Half.com in 2001 or 2002, not because of poor sales, but because of an eBay policy change.
Up to then Half.com used a 1-5 rating system with optional comments for their feedback similar to what Amazon continues to use today.

Under this system, it was not uncommon to receive feedback from buyers that read something like this: “Great seller. Fast shipping, book in better condition than described, well packed.” Then they would give you a “3″ with the numerical rating system.

Shortly after eBay decided to let Half.com remain a separate entity and not absorb it into eBay.com, they made some administrative changes to the site. One of these changes was to convert Half.com’s numerical system to eBay’s “Positive”, “Neutral”, and “Negative” system. When they did this, Half.com feedback ratings of 5 and 4 were converted to “positives”. Ratings of 3 were converted to “neutrals”. And, ratings of 2 and 1 were converted to “negatives”. This suddenly left a lot of Half.com sellers with a lot of “neutral” feedback.

In addition, as part of the feedback consolidation, anyone selling on Half.com who wasn’t registered on eBay was forced to register their User ID with eBay. Any sellers who already had a registered eBay user ID but were selling on Half.com under a different user ID (I was one of these), was forced to drop their Half.com ID and use their eBay ID on both sites.

They announced these upcoming changes a few weeks before they actually implemented them and I wasn’t about to have 20 to 30 neutral feedback ratings suddenly show up on my eBay feedback. So, I canceled my Half.com account and began using Amazon exclusively for book sales.

I’ve never even looked at the Half.com site since then. At the time I was selling three to four books on Amazon for every one book sold on Half.com each month. Because of that, I never viewed it as a great loss, nor did I ever consider starting to use them again.

Since it’s been four or five years, there isn’t any way I can honestly compare the two with any validity.

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