I am doing a correspondence math class this summer, the school wanted me to buy the text from them for $116.00. So i go check for the book on half.com, thinking it will cost me about $65. People were selling it for $15-25, i bought a copy in good condition for $3.
What is even better is after i bought it i found out that the person i bought it from lives in the same town as i do, so instead of waiting 3-5 days for it to be delivered maybe i can just drive out and pick it up from them in person in a day or two.
I looooooove it too. I’ve bought and sold so much stuff on there, I couldn’t even keep track of it anymore. If I have something really unusual that is hard to list conventionally, I’ll go to eBay, but you can’t beat half dot com for other stuff. No listing fees, no auctions. And I just got another direct deposit notice from them today.
I hope more students find their way to this site. There’s just no excuse for the gouging that goes on with textbook prices. I’m a prof, and even I get tired of publishers making teeny little cosmetic changes to a book and then announcing a new edition just so they can make more dough off of the students.
Be thankful you dealt with a responsible seller. I used half.com in September 2003 to buy textbooks from one seller who:
[ul][li]never shipped the goods, despite my credit card having been charged[/li][li]had an invalid e-mail address associated with his account, thus making it impossible for me to contact him[/li][li]had a high seller rating, yet further inspection revealed many negative comments concerning his transactions.[/ul][/li]Luckily I was able to get my credit card charge refunded after lodging a complaint with the half.com buyer protection staff.
<b>biqu</b>, on Half, the seller doesn’t charge your credit card, Ebay does. Just FYI. But you do make a good point that one should always actually look at the seller ratings (both on Half and Ebay), because a ranking of 150 with only 1 negative (that’s about where I’m at) is probably a lot better than someone with a 2000 and 100 negatives. If there’s anyone with over about 1.5-2% negative feedback, I avoid them.
But I love Half mostly because it allows me to sell a bunch of books that the local used bookstore won’t take - Getting $10 for old college textbooks that I’ve been lugging around for 10 years is great!
A half.com seller called merry_mariam is currently selling a book that I would like to have, but her feedback profile has 523 negatives compared to 9135 positives, or about 5% negative feedback. Would you consider it too risky to deal with this seller?
I love it too. That’s wear I get all of my books. But ONLY books. Out of about a dozen cds and dvds I’ve bought, only 3 or 4 were worth the money I spent (and I got them cheap). I try to buy from individuals instead of the businesses that are just getting rid of their dammaged stuff.
One of the new “improvements” I don’t care for, is the way they handle refunds. It used to take forever to get a refund, but you only had to contact half.com and they would ivestigate, and you’d be refunded. NOW you contact the seller, which is handy if you have a question, but not so handy if you want to know where you’re item is at. After about 30 days you can contact half.com BUT you have to have copies of ever single email you sent to the seller and their replies. And you can’t file a complaint after 60 days.
