
Ebay shuts down Half.com - lnrdgmz
http://pages.half.ebay.com/help/account/closing.html
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jszymborski
In case anyone was wondering what the service was:

"It was a web site where sellers offered items for sale at fixed prices. The
items available on half.com are limited to books, textbooks, music, movies,
video games, and video game consoles."[0]

It curiously is also the reason why a town in Oregon was named "Half.com" for
an entire year in '99[1]. Man, those dot-com days...

[0][https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Half.com](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Half.com)

[1][https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halfway,_Oregon#Half.com_name_...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halfway,_Oregon#Half.com_name_change)

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slackingoff2017
Hahaha that's the best 99 throwback I've seen a long time! Funny part is the
web is just as influential as they thought it would be someday, just in a
different way than many expected.

Seems like the hype cycle brings out all the crackpots. Once everything
explodes businesses come in and start welding the pieces to existing
processes. That's when most of the real potential is realized.

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AdmiralAsshat
Half.com was useful back when Ebay was more of a strict auction site. I
remember using it circa 2001 or so to buy some rare PS1 games. I may have used
it as recently as 2008 or so to buy textbooks. Now-a-days, most Ebay Sellers
have "stores" anyway, where stuff is strictly on a Buy it Now price, so
half.com is basically obsolete.

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VerDeTerre
I don't think it's entirely a matter of Half.com becoming obsolete because of
changes to eBay; I suspect they lost out to Amazon Marketplace, which provides
basically the same service with (I'd assume) a larger reach. I would often
check both sites and see the same listings by the same sellers.

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Pxtl
Yup. My first textbooks I sold on half.com. My last textbooks I sold on Amazon
marketplace.

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iopuy
Wow this was a name I hadn't heard in about 15 years. The cycle of life is
real on the web. A business is born, thrives, and dies. Rest easy old friend.

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khazhoux
This was Josh Koppelman's startup, and he went on to co-found First Round
Capital.

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jacobkg
Sad to hear it. I just started selling my old books on half.com and found the
experience to be pretty great. I sold a couple hundred dollars worth of books
in a month or two.

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kilroy123
Same here. I would buy and re-sell all my textbooks back in college.

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pitaa
I am a bit surprised by this in some ways, but not in others. Half.com was a
decent place for textbooks, but they've gone down hill in recent years. Ebay
never seemed to do much development though; logging into my old seller
dashboard I found it looked nearly the same as it did a decade ago- and it
seemed old back then.

I imagine the half.com domain is worth quite a bit. I wonder what their plans
for it are?

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kingnothing
Half.com was the best place to buy academic textbooks. I just used it a couple
of weeks back actually for a copy of On Cooking.

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tinus_hn
They have some of the worst scores I have ever seen on consumer advocacy
sites.

Seems like either they had a model that doesn't work in this day and age or
just a site that tries to scam every last cent it can while it lasts.

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whipoodle
Too bad, I bought a lot of cheap books and years back, cheap DVDs there.

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arosier
RIP, just listed 10 books on half.com on Wednesday.

