Half.com
It once bought a whole town for its name
Half.com sold used books, textbooks, CDs, DVDs and games at fixed prices, and paid the town of Halfway, Oregon $100,000 to rename itself Half.com for a year. eBay bought it in 2000 for around $350 million, tried to close it in 2003, gave up when sellers refused to move, and finally shut it in 2017.
Timeline [edit]
- 1999
-
July 1999
Launch
Half.com opens
A fixed-price marketplace for used books, music and games.
-
December 1999
Feature
A town changes its name
Halfway, Oregon becomes Half.com, Oregon for a year, for $100,000 and twenty computers.
- 2000
-
August 2000
Acquisition
eBay buys Half.com
Roughly $350 million, folded into eBay accounts and feedback.
- 2003
-
2003
Shutdown announced
eBay announces closure, then reverses
Sellers refuse to migrate and the decision is abandoned a year later.
- 2017
-
16 June 2017
Shutdown announced
Sellers are told it will close
eBay says the core platform serves everyone better.
-
31 August 2017
Shutdown
Half.com closes
Returns are processed until 31 October. The domain redirects to eBay.
The site through time
Browse half.com as it was, via the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine:
Ownership [edit]
Key figures [edit]
| Metric | Value | As of | Confidence |
|---|---|---|---|
| Valuation (USD) ▲ | 350 million | August 2000 | Reported Approximate price eBay paid in 2000 |
Confirmed official figures · Reported media, cites a source · Estimated analyst or our estimate
Why it shut down [edit]
Official line: eBay told sellers on 16 June 2017 that Half.com would close on 31 August 2017, saying it could serve buyers and sellers better by focusing on the core eBay.com platform. Returns were processed until 31 October.
Our analysis: Half.com was a fixed-price marketplace inside a company built on auctions. Once eBay itself moved to mostly fixed prices, Half.com was a second checkout, a second seller base and a second codebase doing the same job.
History [edit]
A town called Half.com
Josh Kopelman and Sunny Balijepalli started Half.com in 1999 with a simple pitch against eBay: no bidding. A seller picked a price, saw what similar copies had recently sold for, and listed. A buyer saw everything available and chose. For used books and textbooks in particular, that was far better than an auction, because one copy of a paperback is much like another and nobody wants to wait three days to find out if they won.
In December 1999 the company paid the town of Halfway, Oregon $100,000 and twenty computers to rename itself Half.com for a year. It is still one of the best marketing stunts the internet has produced, and the town got a working computer lab out of it.
Bought, then almost closed, then kept
eBay bought Half.com in 2000 for roughly $350 million and wired it into its own accounts, feedback and payments.
In 2003 eBay announced it would close the site and move everyone onto eBay proper. The sellers refused. Their listings, their feedback and their pricing tools were built around a fixed-price marketplace that eBay did not then offer, and enough of them declined to migrate that eBay reversed the decision a year later. Half.com then ran, largely untouched, for another thirteen years.
The second closure
On 16 June 2017 eBay told sellers that Half.com would close on 31 August. The reasoning was that the core platform could serve everyone better, which by then was true: eBay had long since become a mostly fixed-price marketplace, so Half.com was a duplicate of its parent.
Returns were handled until 31 October 2017, and half.com now redirects to eBay. Josh Kopelman went on to found First Round Capital.
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Sources [edit]
- eBay to Close Half.com, Its Book and Media Marketplace EcommerceBytes 16 June 2017 [archived]
- eBay Is Shutting Half.com Down, This Time For Good IndieWire 19 June 2017 [archived]
Last verified: 13 August 2026. Spotted an error? Suggest an edit (corrections with sources are reviewed and applied).