Half.com

» see half.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

i did not use half.com. it was a marketplace built around used american textbooks and used american cds, and turkey was on the wrong end of every shipping calculation that mattered. you could browse it from ankara and add an item to a cart, but the math broke once you tried to pay for ground shipping out of oregon.

the site launched on april 16, 1999. josh kopelman and sunny balijepalli built it as a fixed-price marketplace. ebay was an auction site at that point, and half was the answer to "what if you just wanted the price up front for a used book, no bidding". the catalog ran on isbn and upc lookup. a seller picked an existing product page and listed a copy against it instead of writing their own listing from scratch.

ebay bought half.com in 2000 for roughly 350 million dollars. the price tag arrived one year after launch, which tells you what 1999 looked like from inside an ebay strategy meeting. the two sites ran independently for a long time. half kept its url and kept its fixed-price catalog. the dorm-room used-textbook business stayed put as the core.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the marketing stunt ~

in december 1999, half.com paid the town of halfway, oregon 100,000 dollars plus twenty computers to rename itself "half.com, oregon" for a year. the town went along. the press covered it for a news cycle and moved on. wikipedia still lists halfway as "the world's first dot-com city".

the era's playbook for getting attention was big and silly. flooz.com hired whoopi goldberg, and pets.com built a sock puppet that toured tv networks. half.com bought a town. of those, only the town came out the other end intact.

~ the actual end ~

half.com survived ebay's first decade as a corporate sibling. it had its own login and its own fixed-price catalog. then in 2016 ebay raised the commission cut on half.com sales from 15% to 25%, which is the kind of internal margin call that quietly tells sellers to leave. they did. the site went into a slow drain.

ebay announced the shutdown in june 2017 and turned off the catalog on september 1 of that year. listings were ported into the main ebay product database. anyone who had a half.com account already had an ebay account, so the migration cost nothing on paper. the brand was gone. josh kopelman by then had moved on to first round capital and was funding a second wave of ecommerce startups that did not need to buy oregon towns to get noticed.

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