Posts tagged “half.com”

We really don’t want you as a customer

In 2006 Half.com (remember them? I barely do) decided to delete my inventory for sale as a response to level of activity not meeting their standards.

Today I got this email
half.jpg

I haven’t been selling my stuff there for two years, since, well, they got rid of my inventory listings. And now I won’t be buying stuff since they aren’t going to maintain my wishlist? I am amused at the patronizing and punitive tone they’ve taken in writing this email. One wonders what the cost is for them to maintain this data, and what they gain by purging their database of crappy customers like myself.

Of course, there are so many more positive ways they could come up with to encourage my action. What sort of non-monetary incentives could they provide for getting me to add something to my wishlist in the next 24 hours? They’ve got this amazing opportunity to interact with me and make it positive, instead they ridiculously negative about it. Wouldn’t you expect better from eBay?

Your Inventory Will Soon Expire

We are sending you this email to confirm that you currently have inventory listed on Half.com. Our records show you have not been to the Half.com site for approximately 75 days
In order to ensure your continued success as a seller, we encourage you to make sure your prices, conditions, and descriptions are up to date and correct. We have found that sellers who re-price and refresh their inventory on a regular basis experience higher sales volumes than those who do not. Additionally, it is important for us at Half.com to ensure that our buyers are purchasing from active and attentive sellers.
If you do not visit your Half.com account by 04-16-2006, your inventory will be suspended. Please take some time to review the items you have for sale and make any modifications you think might be necessary

This is funny timing; I was “interviewing myself” during a recent dog walk (like showering and falling asleep, good times for an interior monologue) about why I had been loyal to Half.com for so long and now almost exclusively buy and sell on Amazon. At one point I was given a number of Amazon gift certificates as thanks for some speaking I had done, so I was regularly going back to Amazon to spend them. I also found Half didn’t have the inventory compared to Amazon. Half.com also went through a protracted integration with eBay and put us (as sellers) through all sorts of various bullshit, with warnings of changes coming, planning to do away with the service entirely, then changing their minds. It didn’t seem stable, it didn’t seem comfortable. There was at least one more point at which they were eliminating some categories and sent me a notice that some of my inventory would not longer be offered (if I recall, they had initially let you create your own categories for things that they didn’t have ISBN or part numbers etc. for, but did away with that during some revision of their system) past a certain date.

In other words, they were not easy to do business with.

As a customer of Amazon, I’ve had no shortage of hassles with them, but as a seller, it’s been pretty darn painless. I don’t move a lot of stuff, I just have thrown some old books up there and sometimes one of them will sell. Rarely. I guess they make me renew all my listings every sixty days, but that’s a bunch of clicking and not a lot of thinking. Half has always hassled me, and I’ve slowly abandoned them.

But this takes the cake. As I’ve written here before I don’t feel great about being threatened with removal (at least Half is warning me, unlike Starwood in the previous link). Not to mention that their email is incredibly inept since 4/16 was nearly 2 months ago.

Half doesn’t want me? I don’t need them. A customer has been lost.

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