A Great Online Auction Alternative!. Review on Half

If you have ever been frustrated by online auctions and spent precious hours/weeks hoping to own what you have bid your hard earned money only to have it snatched away at the last minute, then you need to visit Half.com. I was at one time fixated upon Ebay since I could find and bid on items that I could not find anywhere else after looking for 10+ years. But after my last experience of bidding, hoping, and waiting only to have to stop at my maximum bid and allow another person to take what I wanted so badly, I decided to find an alternative.

An online friend of mine introduced me to Half.com. It is a place of hard-to-find/impossible-to-find items that are not auctioned but sold through Half.com. Although it may seem similar in ways to auction sites, it is very different since you can cut out up to two weeks worth of waiting for a chance to own what you want.

Membership and Sign Up

It was simple to become a Half.com member as one simply fills out their registration form with the necessary information such as needed for billing and shipping. Should your credit card information or shipping address change, this can be changed at any time or right before you finish your transaction.

Note: Verify that your machine’s date/time is correct; otherwise, it can hinder you from completing a transaction. I experienced this and even though my time was correct, my date was two days off, and the site would not allow the transaction to proceed.

To Make A Purchase

One can use the Half.com search engine to find the items that is being sought after. The search engine works extremely well and is better than many online product search engines.

After finding the item, a list of sellers with a brief description of the item will appear with their asking price. Choose the item carefully as a few sellers “cancel” your order due to being out of stock and wastes your time. Check out the seller carefully. Check their ratings and other people’s comments about their experiences with their transactions. If you have a hunch a seller might not be legitimate, it will probably show up one way or the other with the feedback from other buyers. This is an often overlooked important purchasing tool.

Should you have a question about the item that the brief description and full description does not cover, you can leave the seller a question. I have used this service, and I received my reply within two hours. I wouldn’t count on that as an average, but I have never waited more than a day or so before receiving my answer.

Items on sale are: Books, Music, Movies/DVDs, Games, Computers, Electronics, Trading Cards, and Sporting Goods and over 15 million items are listed as of now. Items can be located by type or if you trust a particular seller, you can browse his product line. Once an item you want is found, you have a huge chance that there will be more than one selection. This is the beauty of this site since buyers are not cutting each other’s throats bidding for a unique item.

Transactions

After you select the item you want from a seller, simply “buy” it. Half.com will send you an email confirming the order, and Half.com sends the seller a message about your purchase. The seller has two days to reply to Half.com or the transaction is cancelled. This has happened to me once so far. Fortunately, there were a few other sellers of the same product or I might have been upset.

Once Half.com receives the seller’s response, Half.com contacts you again and informs you of the status of your order. You should receive your order within a week or so of the seller’s confirmation. If you do not receive your order, contact Half.com since most of the items have a Buyer Protection Policy for the first $750 of an order.

Sell What You Have

Although I have not become a seller yet (lack of time to mess with it more than anything),Half.com appears to be easy as long as you have the UPC number of an item. For CDs, ISBNs should be ignored when listing. You must use the UPC number.

A tip to sellers would be to make sure if you have something listed that you are checking your email for confirmation of sales at least once a day. If you have a listing and ignore a buyer, you are hurting your seller rating, so, please confirm your order as soon as possible. Also, Sellers do NOT make any money on cancelled orders. Buyers are not charged for cancelled orders from the seller.

Seller Shipping Instructions

Half.com is very detailed at how to package and ship an item. Simply print out the order notification email Half.com sent you for the transaction and cut off the bottom portion. Enclose it in your package to the buyer since this is your reference and packaging slip. Secure the item with some type of protective material such as cardboard, bubble wrap, Styrofoam, newspaper, etc. Place the wrapped item into a strudy box or other protective packaging. And finally, make sure you use block lettering when addressing the package and print neatly! We do not need to cause any delays of product shipping to the buyer.

The standard shipment method is Media Mail (formerly called Special Standard Mail). Although Half.com claims that it is the buyer’s preference as to which shipping method is used, I have not seen a transaction yet that I have had the “choice”. I have always been at the seller’s mercy as to the type of shipment services.

Customer Service

Half.com’s customer service is excellent from my experience. I had mentioned earlier about not being able to complete a transaction because of my machine’s time/date was incorrect. Although there is an FAQ for problems one might experience on the site, I was stumped when I could not order the Gameboy cartridge for my son I had been looking for locally but with no success. I had found it at Half.com and was trying to purchase it, but I kept getting sent back to the Log In screen when my transactions was about half way finished.

I contacted their customer service, and I quickly received suggestions and help on how to troubleshoot my problem. I was frustrated at the time and expressed my feelings in an email. A day or so later, they were still emailing me trying to get my transaction completed. Finally I discovered my date was wrong, and I fixed it. I could complete my transaction.

However, I wish I hadn’t because apparently Half.com decided to send a copy of the game to me since they knew I had been trying so hard to purchase from them. They sent me the game free of charge. I did not realize at the time that it was not the one I bought from a seller. After a second copy came in, I was confused. I went to my account and noticed that the first copy was not from my seller or had the game been charged to my account. Half.com tried to keep me happy by providing what I wanted, and I commend them for that. It is rare these days that a business cares enough about their customer that they would go out of their way to satisfy me. I was impressed.

The prices are not only “half” the price as many new items, so are even cheaper than that. I recently bought a book in excellent condition of lateral logic problems that I found for only $1.00. That has been one of the best book buys I’ve ever had.

Conclusion

I will definitely be a return buyer at this site, and I would recommend checking out their products because you never know what is there just for the taking.