Half Dot Com

Used books, cds, movies and games -- at half of retail price or less.

It's a clearing house for information: You're buying the books directly from individuals who happen to own them -- like a giant cyber "swap meet." "Half.com" makes money by taking a 15% commission from the sale price when they pay the sellers. (Shipping charges seem to be a simple pass-through.)

An analogy:

half.com is a garage sale
ebay is an auction

(half.com is owned by eBay.)

half.com no longer offers $5 off coupons as an incentive to get your friends to join. Sorry!

According to http://www.half.com/help/index.cfm?helpsection=checkout#3 all purchases at Half.com must be made with a valid credit card.

See OnlinePayments for general discussion on that topic.

http://www.half.com/account/login.cfm says: Membership limited to persons residing in the 50 United States - I could pretend surprise. -- OleAndersen

The market dynamics are interesting. eBay gives sellers a limited window of time to sell their wares, so you can get products that sell for less than they should because interested buyers just didn't happen to stop buy that week. HalfDotCom lets sellers keep products up indefinitely, but the tradeoff is that buyers looking for that product see yours along with everything else. It seems to work well for those products that genuinely can be reduced to commodity status: books, music, movies, video games. When I sell stuff there I mark it at a certain price and then try to take it down every week or so until somebody grabs it. -- francis