How to Sell Books on Half.com

Have you been wondering how to sell your books online? As a companion site to eBay, Half.com is a forum where books, music, and movies are advertised for sale - new and used. Functioning like an online market, it does not employ the auction format of its bigger sibling eBay but rather uses an even simpler process. This article will show you how to sell books on Half.com and provide some tips for optimizing your experience.

How Half.com Works – The Basics

If you have a User ID and a password for eBay, then you will use the same login information at Half.com. You will have to sign up as a new user if you don’t already have an established profile. This registration process is easy and free. You’ll need a credit card or debit card (to verify your identity) and a bank account so that your proceeds can be deposited.

Unlike eBay, where you can sell virtually anything, Half.com is a forum for mass-produced media items. You can only list items that already “exist,” so to speak, in large quantities – like books, CDs, DVDs, and video games. In the case of books, Half.com uses the unique ISBN assigned to a particular edition of a book and maintains a web page for that book. ISBN stands for International Standard Book Number. Commercial books all have these (usually) ten digit numbers, often printed near the bar code. Sometimes they are prefaced with the letters ISBN.

On each book’s special page, Half.com maintains a list of all the copies of that book for sale by different people in different conditions. Ranging from “Brand New” to “Acceptable,” these categories are important for helping shoppers determine just how used of a book they may want and how prices vary accordingly. Half.com employs specific definitions for each of the condition categories, so it’s important to look over all your books before listing them to determine what kind of shape they’re truly in.

Listing an Item