I sell a few items on eBay's Half.com, like Planet P's Pink World, for $75, if you want to pick it up. I started doing that around the time I was working for a company called Licensing Ventures Incorporated, who sold quite a bit through channels like Half, eBay, and the Amazon marketplace.
If you've ever bought or sold on Half.com, you've noticed, no doubt, they don't sell software of any kind, and precious little hardware. They also don't have a marketplace for odd or antique items that are eBay's bread and butter, like cigarette cards (I used to have a lot of these and somehow lost them all, some of them classics, and I can't tell you how depressing that is when I reflect upon it, but nevermind). More common and contemporary are comic books. So what's the big deal? Well, the best thing about Half.com is that it's not an auction site. It costs nothing to list your products, and you can leave them on there, at whatever price you set, for as long as you want. If you have competitve prices on software like we do, then it'd clearly make a great, inexpensive marketplace for our software. Even if they only took major products, like Microsoft and Symantec, it'd still be a great marketplace for us.
For people (like me) who have a lot of comic books but don't want to sell them unless I'm going to get a decent price for them, it'd be a great place to sell them.
The best thing about half.com is that it's a straight competetive marketplace. It's not cluttered with auctions or a mix of "Buy it Now" and only "Buy it Now" and auction products sorted by the end of the auction, it's just a sales site where if I wanted to be a nickel better than my closest competitor, I can be, or if I want to be $5 more than the closest competitor so that I might sell my product after everybody else's is sold and gone, I can do that, too. As a seller of software in a competetive marketplace, I'd love to be able to sell Microsoft Office 2007 OEM that way. Right now, it's only $299.95, or $297.95 each if you buy 10 or more copies, BTW.
Alas, we cannot. So, I'm selling some music and some books on Half.com personally, and that's about all it's good for now. I miss the days of my Filemaker Pro price harvester that I used at LVI, where I'd collect all our competitors prices and then try to price us a penny or two below them, in order to be more competetive. That was fun!
For a little blast from my past, check out in the Internet Archive of HitMeNow.com, which I have some fun stories about. Including how it may have floundered (in my opinion) because we were going in too many directions at one time, but also how they even had a Memphis office for me to get a job at because they had purchased Kozmo.com, that dot.com boom company that was going to deliver music, DVDs, books, food and basics to anybody who ordered them in under an hour. Wonder why that didn't work out. Could be because they spent all their venture capital on limousines and Kozmo.com embroidered shirts.
BTW, the beginning of the end of HitMeNow.com happened, in my opinion, when a guy named Jeff Abrams came on, a guy with a corporate background at big box retailer Best Buy, who some have credited with architecting the largely unsuccessful effort to use music CDs as a loss leader at Best Buy (the idea being that they'd come in for the cheap music and leave with a projection television set)that helped begin the process of putting stand-alone music retailers, like Camelot music,out of business. Click on his name above to read about it, or click here.
One of the big pushes while I was at LVI was to get DropItOff.com off the ground, and I guess they did, because unlike HitMeNow.com, that URL still works, and much has been done since I worked there. Hope it's working for them, I know most of the the stripmall stores I've seen spring up to take folks stuff and list it on ebay, etc., have all ended up closing. I'm not sure there's that big a market for Internet middle-men in the Web 2.0 era. Time will tell, I suppose.
Anyhoo, I still think it's unfortunate that HitMeNow tanked, but it was a fun job and a very interesting place for an entertainment geek like me to work. On the whole, I look back at it with fond memories.
And speaking of entertainment, we've got Roxio EasyMedia7 Basic for $5.95 and Roxio Easy CD Creator for $11.95, as of this posting. If you're interested in that kind of thing.
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