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Amazon Vs Half.com

Half.com, Sell Books, Sell Textbooks

As the summer semester of college quickly approaches, one of the my person least favorite things to have to do is purchase text books. Not only can text books be hard to find, they can be very pricey as well. College bookstores can usually have a large mark up on text books. Also when you go to resell your books to the bookstore, they usually give you next to nothing for your used books. Some larger colleges and universities have a variety of independent off-campus bookstores that offer less expensive option. There is a problem if your school only has one bookstore to choose from. Thanks to the Internet, there are a few options for students that don’t have off-campus bookstores. Two great sites in particular are Half.com and Amazon.com.

Half and Amazon offer students the options to not only buy used books online, but new text books as well. Students may also sell their text books on these sites as well. The purpose of this article is to compare the two sites and see which one is the best option for students.

Half.com is one site you can buy and sell text books online. Half.com is owned by eBay, so you need to register with eBay to have an account with Half.com. Half.com has a easy interface to buy and sell textbooks. The easiest way is to search by the ISBN of the book. When you find the text book you need you can either buy a copy of the book or sell it. The page will list all the text books for sale by categories of new, like new, very good, good, and fair condition. Listed beside each seller is the price of the text book and comments about the book from the seller. You pay for the book through the Half.com website and the seller will then ship your text book out to you.

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If you want to sell one of your used text books, Half.com allows you this option as well. Once you set up a sellers account you can list all the text books that you want to sell. Half.com offers a lot of great sellers tools. You can actually look up the last price the same book you are selling sold for. This is a great way to determine the price you need to sell your book at. When a book is sold, Half.com will reimburse you a bit for shipping charges, but they will also charge a small commission. Half.com will deposit the payment in your checking account around either the first of the month or sometime around the middle.

Amazon offers the options to buy and sell books as well. Amazon also has a great interface that allows a person to easily list your books or find text books to buy. When you search for a book to purchase, Amazon will give you the price of the book new. If you look under the new price, you will see a link that says you can find it used for less. When you click on that link, you will find a list of sellers and the prices that they are offering on Amazon.

Selling your used text book on Amazon is easy as well. While Amazon doesn’t offer some of the great seller’s tools that Half.com offers, the seller section on Amazon is easy to use. Once your text book sells, Amazon will notify you by email and you will confirm the sale. Once the sale is confirmed, just ship the text book to the buyer. Just like Half.com, Amazon will reimburse shipping charges, but charge a small commission as well. Amazon will usually send out payments around the beginning and middle of each month.

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While both Amazon and Half.com are great, I prefer to sell on Half.com. I find that the prices are usually better if you are buying a text book. I have also had better luck selling my text books on Half.com as well. I will usually sell a book quicker on Half.com. So I would have to give a slight edge to Half.com. I would recommend using both services. You can list your book on both sites and just cancel the listing on the site that the book doesn’t sell on.

Overall, both Amazon and Half.com offer great options on buying text books at a decent price.

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