Please visit our online store at http://store.yahoo.com/samizdat
For buyers of books, music, movies, and games, if you search at Amazon, you see choices for new merchandise direct from Amazon and also offers for the same goods secondhand and cheaper from the thousands of merchants selling through Amazon's Zshops. For rare and hard to find books, you could check out Bibliofind. And for foreign books, you'll get a wide selection at Schoenhof's. And you might find just about anything at eBay's auction site, though you have to compete with others for what you want, and there might be a delay of a few weeks before you receive the goods. You could also try trading your books, music, and videos for credit you can use to buy others at MrSwap or WebSwap.com.
Now, you have another alternative -- half.com, which is now owned by eBay. For the buyer, this site is set up like an online store. Their catalog contains just about all books, movies, and music produced in the last 20 years or so. Not everything is in stock, but most items are. What's different is that the inventory is held not by half.com but by tens of thousands of individuals like yourself. And when you buy, the owner sends the merchandise straight to you.
The name is based on the typical price -- half or less than retail. The merchandise is second hand, and rated/priced based on condition. In many cases you can get "like new" quality, for a very good price. The sellers have agreed to ship within 24 hours of notification/confirmation of a sale, and most seem to do a good job of abiding by that. (Like at an auction site, buyers rate sellers on their performance. So those who sell regularly have plenty of incentive to make sure buyers are satisfied.)
You pick the items you want; agree to pay half.com by credit card; an email goes to the seller who must confirm the sale; then you get confirmation, you credit card is debited, and very soon you receive the merchandise. There is no bidding, no delays, no uncertainty. There is no need to exchange email with the seller. Everything goes quickly and smoothly, like with a retail store transaction, and the prices are very tempting.
And about a month after you buy a book, you'll get an email suggesting that if you've read it already you might want to resell it now through half.com.
For the seller too, half.com is far more convenient to use than an auction. To list an item, all you need to do is enter the ISBN or UPC number (the standard codes found on all recent products of these kinds), and indicate the product's condition. The standard description and photo is already in the database. That means it usually takes just a couple of minutes to add your item at half.com, while it typically takes 15 minutes to 30 minutes to add an item at eBay.
Here pricing too is easy (as opposed to the guesswork and research involved in pricing at eBay). They prompt you with a suggested price (usually half of retail) and tell you the going price for other copies of the same item in the same condition at half.com and also at other retail sites. You name your price, and the item is added to their inventory. Someone searching for a particular item will see your copy (condition, price, and brief comments) together with the info about all the other copies of it now on sale at half.com. And you don't need to collect payment from your customers -- half.com does that for you and sends you a check once a month (every two weeks if you sell lots).
Think about this business model from the point of view of half.com. They can offer hundreds of thousands of items for sale without having to pay for or warehouse or even select any of the inventory. They also don't need to deal with fulfillment -- sellers package and ship their own merchandise.
Half.com gets paid upfront by credit card by the buyer -- the sales price plus a shipping charge. The seller gets the selling price plus an allowance for shipping costs, minus a commission of 15% of the selling price. The email notifications and confirmations are all automated.
I'd expect that this simple and powerful approach will be imitated again and again in other markets.
This site is Published by B&R Samizdat Express, 33 Gould St., West Roxbury, MA 02132. (617) 469-2269. seltzer@samizdat.com
Please visit our online store at http://store.yahoo.com/samizdat
Return to B&R Samizdat Express
Buy Richard's book Web Business Bootcamp (published by Wiley) http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0471164194/brsamizdatexpres
.
<
| Internet Business Showcase: | ||
|
|
|