Now, I will have to pay a listing fee, and will be able to list my books for only 1 week. And I have to hassle with non-paying bidders, bidders who don’t bother to communicate, and all that other nonsense. After that, if they don’t sell, I have to re-list them. Hello! More work for me! Plus money out of my pocket whether I sell or not!
Bastards.
Of course, they try to tell you how exciting it is, and how lucky we all are to have the gloriously glowing opportunity to do something WE’D HAVE BEEN DOING ALL ALONG IF WE’D WANTED TO!
Bastards.
Now I either shut down my book selling thing, or go to Amazon, where at least listings sit for 3 months before having to be re-entered. Most likely I’ll just shut down, and there goes my sole independent source of income as a stay-at-home mom with 4 kids under the age of 7.
Fucking bastards. They can’t possibly have been losing money. They had to have been making millions of dollars - just not up front, whether inventory sold or not. Now they’ll make less money, because I sure as hell won’t be supporting them with my book sales. I hope they make a LOT less money, and suffer the excoriation of every successful bookseller who LIKED the half.com system and DIDN’T want to use Ebay, and now flips them off and goes to Amazon. Or something.
I picture you with bags under your eyes, bruises on your legs and thinning, greying hair!
My wife does the bookselling thing on both ebay and half. She hasn’t told me anything about this. I’ll ask her how she is coping with it. Thankfully, she only has one 2 1/2 year old to deal with (so far), but the image isn’t that far off for her either.
I was one was was ticked off at the joiner! half.com was far better before ebay gots its claws on it. I still buy from there every now and then, but begrudgingly so…I can’t think of a single thing that improved after ebay took over…not one single thing…every change was for the worse IMHO!
It just bothers me. I sell on Ebay anyway, but some things were easier to sell on Half.com.
I’m glad the UPC codes can be used for certain items though as it makes things a little easier. But, items that sold at Half might not sell on Ebay or would only sell as a lot.
I sell on Amazon too, but some of the Half.com items aren’t worth selling on Amazon.
I soooooooo agree. I did the half.com thing for about a year. It was great, just list it once, don’t have to watch it, you get an email when you send something out. I hardly noticed the ‘commission’ that came out of the fees.
Now, it bites. I don’t have time to fucking pay attention to my listings. I already used ebay for rare stuff and things I actually wanted to make a profit on, not just things to get rid of for some change. I pulled all my lisings on half.com several months ago. I don’t know what I am going to do with my huge boxes of paperbacks and textbooks from last semester.
My gut feeling is that it makes no difference HOW many people were upset. They had a ‘town hall’ meeting where, as far as I can tell, the CEO told everybody how wonderful it was. I doubt they’d be deterred if ALL their sellers were pissed. Anyway, they seem to have deliberately omitted to offer sellers any input into this whatsoever. Or to respond to people who tried to complain anyway.
Meanwhile, I have a couple hundred books sitting in my garage, and I know I won’t get jack shit for them at Half Price Books, Third Place Books, or any of the other local chain second-hand bookstores. They can’t pay me much because they can’t sell them for much, and they have overhead and everything. I understand that.
But this is NOT an improvement. Not even remotely. They can wrap it up in bright shiny party-paper, and it still stinks.
I guess most will migrate to Amazon. Listing is free but the selling fee of “$0.99 plus 6 to 15 percent of the sales price” is pretty steep for small ticket items.
Are there any other options for the nickel and dime crowd?
Mutter grumble snarl. Great. Now I have to basically go through and list over 200 books all over again if I want to enjoy the ease, extra sales, and convenience of their wonderful change.
So I opened a store. Fine. I experimentally listed a couple of books. Fine. No problem. Now all I have to do is list the other 200 or so. Yeah. In all my spare time.
