Product Trends Magazine

About the company: "Half.com is an innovative online marketplace that brings together buyers and sellers. Whether you are looking for the hottest new products or something hard-to-find, you can find it at drastically reduced prices on Half.com. There are millions of products to choose from in Books, Music, Movies, Video Games, and Game Systems."

The big pitch: Save $5 on your first purchase, and get $5 more if you refer a friend!

If you’ve ever used eBay to find second hand goods that you value more than the guy that currently owns them, you’re going to love eBay’s spin-off website, Half.com. In all honesty, we love, love, love this website and cannot say enough good things about it.

Half allows you to look for every book, video game, CD, DVD, video tape, audio book, game system, and textbook you’ve ever wanted, and finds a list of users who are prepared to sell you that item for as much as 90% off the regular list price.

For example, we searched for Hunter S. Thompson’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, and found it available in paperback, brand new, for $8.35, or $7.75 in ‘like new’ condition. On the other hand, if ‘good’ condition is acceptable to you, you could get it even cheaper, for $7.00 flat (the description from the seller says it has a little shelf wear around the edges). Considering the retail list price is $12.95, that’s a $5.95 discount from what you’d normally spend - and with the $5 new user discount, you could get that book for just two bucks!

Not good enough? How about The Daily Show’s America: The Book, by Jon Stewart, available like new for just $8.08, a 67% discount from the regular $24.95 list price. Or maybe you’d be interested in a VHS copy of Donnie Darko, for just $2.29? Or the DVD version for $6.99?

If you like the music, you could get a mint copy of 50 Cent’s Get Rich or Die Tryin’ for $3.73, or if you like the older stuff, how about The Eagles’ Hotel California for just $1.49 - a 91% discount on the list price!

Selling your old goods on Half is easy too. Just set up an account, enter the details of your books, CDs, videos, games, etc in their system, and grade it based on the quality of the item - like new, very good, good, or acceptable - then set your price. If someone wants your item, you’ll get the cash and mail it out to them ASAP, and everyone is happy.

Looking for a good cheap source of school textbooks? Half can help you there as well, with many reference books that we looked at coming in at around half price.

In the end, the beauty of Half.com is that you can finally not only afford all the books and movies and games you ever wanted to buy, but when you’re done with them you can resell them and perhaps even make a profit doing so!

The Product Trends rating: There’s no question, this is a top quality organization, which does everything it promises, making both buying and selling very, very easy. Five stars.

To try Half.com for yourself (and get a $5 discount while doing so!), click the image below:

About the company: AbeBooks makes it simple and safe to find and buy—or list and sell—new, used, rare, and out-of-print books online. Book buyers love the variety of over 70 million books offered by more than 13,000 booksellers. This great selection delivers value for all: readers find bestsellers, collectors find rare books, students find textbooks, and treasure hunters find books they’ve been seeking forever.

The big pitch: The best deals on new and used textbooks, free shipping, no minimum purchase.

Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the past dozen years, you’ve undoubtedly heard of Amazon.com and its ilk. Amazon grew from Jeff Bezos’ garage into a multi-billion dollar operation during the internet bubble in the late 90’s, and when others crashed and burned, Amazon stayed (barely) alive by virtue of its huge customer base.

Well, Amazon may be many things, but ‘the only alternative’ is not one of them. In the past few years several companies have waged war on the book giant’s dominance, and as the market leaders diversify into toys and power tools, the true book sellers have been building their stock in trade from the ground up.

AbeBooks is one such company. A book marketplace where booksellers from around the world can hawk their wares of new, used, rare, out of print and textbooks, this company charges the sellers a set flat fee as a ‘membership’ each month, which allows them to see as much as they want, to whomever they want, without limitation. Contrast that to Amazon, where the marketplace sellers pay no subscription fee, but have set postage and handling fees that rule them out of doing any business with overseas buyers, and you begin to see where the big guy is going wrong.

To try AbeBooks out for ourselves, we did a search for books by Hunter S. Thompson, and not only found several rare titles from that author for a few dollars each, we actually found one book selling for as little as a dollar.

That’s right - $1.

AbeBooks understands that Amazon’s independent sellers have precious few checks on the quality of the product being sold, so they’ve developed a system where timewasters and fly-by-nighters just aren’t likely to hang around. By charging a membership fee to sellers, you eliminate scammers and frauds, because it’s much easier for them to ply their trade elsewhere - where they don’t have to pay for the privilege.

Selling your textbooks? You can do that through AbeBooks, by virtue of a partnership with Buyback.com, where you simply enter the ISBN number of the book you want to sell, then their system gives you the price they’re willing to pay. If you accept, you send the book in, they pay for the postage (within the US), and they’ll send you a check.

Looking for a book club? AbeBooks has that too, with a free membership allowing you to talk about the books of the month online with other users.

Looking for a line on a cheap Harry Potter book? No problem - you can get as new copies of the latest Potter release for just $9.53, as of the time of writing. Looking for a first edition? Just click the ‘first edition’ link. Maybe you’re after a signed copy? That’s no problem either, with ten different signed copies available when we checked.

If boy wizards don’t interest you, how about the book everybody is reading - the DaVinci Code - which you can buy in good condition for $4.67, or signed by the author, Dan Brown, for $125.00?
There are many things we like about AbeBooks, from the free shipping to the easy as pie search facility, to the tendency towards supplying not just cheap copies of books, but also rare copies, first editions, out of print texts and new and used school text books. This is a book community for people who love books, and who want more than just the latest copy of the South Beach Diet - they want a great read.

The Product Trends rating: Four and a half stars - Take a look for yourself, and see what the little guys in the book business are doing that puts Amazon to shame.

To try AbeBooks for yourself, click the image below:

About the company: Yahoo Search Marketing lists your site in search results across the web, so you connect with customers who are searching for what you sell. Reach over 80% of active Internet users¹. Advertise to people who are already searching for what you sell. And pay only when a customer clicks on your listing. Sponsored Search prominently displays your business in search results on leading sites like Yahoo!, MSN and AltaVista.

The big pitch: Target prospects searching for businesses in your neighborhood. Reach millions of motivated buyers through Yahoo! Shopping.

When people first launch their website, as new entrants into the global online ecommerce industry, most generally assume that thousands od people will beat a path to their door. Sure, Amazon.com might be the biggest bookseller in the world, but if you set up an alternative book website with better prices or better service, surely you’ll be able to take some of Amazon’s market share, right?

Wrong. In fact, just as the real world is dominated by those with deep pockets, so too is the online world. The sort of traffic numbers that would take you three years to build on your site can happen tomorrow if Yahoo decides to point their millions of customers your way, and the upside of that is that Yahoo WILL point customers your way, and be happy to do so…

If you’re prepared to pay them to, that is.

If that sounds like extortion, it isn’t. In reality, there are many options for you to take in generating traffic for your new corporate shop-front website, but the reality is that only Google and Yahoo can instantly send mass traffic to your website, and the mass sales that should follow.

On Yahoo’s side, they do have good service options. First, they offer a localized search option, so that when people from your area search for your industry, your entry is the first one they see. That’s handy if you’re a small business not too concerned with stretching your marketing dollar into areas that you can’t supply. For example, a roofing contractor has no need to spend money on traffic coming from the next state, so Yahoo allows him to only advertise to those in his area.

The next great tool is the Yahoo Sponsored Search, where your site is listed at the very top of certain keyword searches. For example, if someone searches for Canadian online DVD rental, and those keywords are the ones you’ve purchased, then for a few cents a time, your website will be #1 in that search - for potentially millions of people.

Yahoo also offers a ‘product submit‘ service, where you can offer your product for sale in thousands of Yahoo Stores, and Travel Submit, which does much the same thing for the travel industry, and finally, Directory Submit, where your site is listed the old-fashioned way, in Yahoo’s search engine database.

So how much does it cost? Not as much as you’d think, actually. Sure, if you want it all taken care of without any sweat on your end, Yahoo Search Marketing can do that for $199. They’ll handle everything for you, from account set-up to expert assistance with search term selection and titles and descriptions, and they’ll also give you expert advice in budgeting and marketing strategy. While $199 isn’t chump change, for what is offered, it’s not a bad price, and let’s face it, there’s nobody who knows more about what it takes to best exploit the Yahoo search engine than Yahoo themselves.

Handily, if you choose this option through us, Yahoo will knock $50 off the price.

On the other hand, if you prefer to do all the heavy lifting yourself, you can choose the ’self serve’ option, where you choose the keywords, the listing description, the budgeting, the strategy, and simply pay for the clicks themselves.

The way that works if, you decide how much you want to spend each month ($20 minimum), you decide how much you want to spend per click within that total (10c per click minimum), and then you deposit the money into your Yahoo Search Marketing account. A $30 minimum deposit is required, but if you go through us, Yahoo will top that up with another $25 free of charge, which gives you ample time to try the service out.

And what happens if you do? Well, worst case scenario, you get more traffic and it crashes your server. Best case scenario, you get more traffic and you’ve planned ahead to make sure your web hosting can handle the influx of new customers.

If the keywords you want to sponsor are in-demand, you’re going to pay more per click than the minimum - you should know that ahead of time. But rather than competing for ‘car parts‘ and paying $24 per click, we suggest paying $2 for ‘automobile parts‘ or 12c for ‘car seat covers‘. Be clever with your search words, and go for inexpensive niches rather than all-encompassing mega keywords.

The Product Trends rating: This is one of those instances where you definitely get what you pay for, and if you’re smart, you can utilize the Yahoo Search Marketing system to spend not a lot, and get a whole lot back.

To try Yahoo Search Marketing for yourself, click the image below: