Posted on 03/07/2003 1:53:03 AM PST by Dont Mention the War
Mar 6, 6:58 PM EST
SAN JOSE, Calif. (AP) -- EBay Inc. said Thursday it would shut down Half.com, its fixed-price subsidiary for used books, CDs, videos and other common household items, in late 2004.
Half.com founder Josh Kopelman also said he would leave the company's office in Plymouth Meeting, Pa., effective April 15.
The San Jose, Calif.-based online auction company purchased Half.com in a June 2000 stock swap. The acquisition of Half.com, which at the time listed about 1 million items and had about 250,000 registered users, significantly increased eBay's operating expenses for several quarters.
Founded in October 1999, Half.com sold previously owned products such as books, DVDs and board games for at least half the retail price. Sellers typed in a number corresponding to a bar code on most products, automatically providing them with the official list price.
The company gained fame in May 2000, when it persuaded politicians in tiny Halfway, Ore., to change the town's name to Half.com. Despite complaints from many residents who considered it a silly marketing gimmick, the city erected a sign that said, "Welcome to Half.com Oregon, America's first dot-com city."
Half.com's 65 employees in suburban Philadelphia may relocate to other eBay offices by the end of next year, or they will be eligible for severance packages, eBay spokesman Kevin Pursglove said.
A while back ... six months to a year ago? ... someone (I wish I could remember who) started a very bizarre thread about some utterly meaningless issue. There's nothing special about that, but what was special was this person's less-than-perfect command of the English language (and/or his drunkenness). He used an amusingly odd syntax, with even more amusingly bad spelling. Needless to say, the thread immediately turned into a running joke, and at some point, he got so exasperated at being made fun of that he posted a response that included the line "This is VEY SERIES! It's HUGH!" And, well ... that was the point of no return.
So now, whenever anyone posts a thread that isn't deadly serious (like this one) or is especially tinfoily ("Auugh! My cable system just ran an Emergency Alert System Test! The terrorists are coming!"), people post responses saying "This is vey series!" either as cheeky fun or as a coded insult to the thread starter's exaggeration.
I wish someone could find the original thread.
They did, and it doesn't.
I did a little digging, and confirmed that Half.com was indeed successful as an independent company; I don't know if had yet turned a profit when eBay bought them, but they were spot-on with their business plan and would definitely have become profitable by the date they'd always expected to. The creator/owner simply decided to take the easy money and run when eBay showed up with a big check.
What seems to be the problem, in eBay's eyes, is that Half.com is cannibalizing eBay sales, and they usually make more money when a seller posts his/her items on eBay than if he/she posts them to Half.com.
So, IMHO, it's pretty much inevitable that someone else will create a Half.com clone as soon as eBay kills it off. It's one of the rare dotcom ideas that works.
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