Half.com 

www.half.com

We caught up with Mark Hughes the former Vice President of

Marketing at Half.com. Mark a marketing genius came up with

the concept of renaming the town of Halfway, Oregon as

Half.com. Five months later Half.com was sold to eBay for

$300 million.

The rest is internet folk law.

Your name:                Mark Hughes 

Position / title:           Former Vice President, Marketing 

Company name:       eBay’s Half.com

Website:                   www.half.com  

Your company / website vision statement / goal:

The smartest place to buy and sell

What you sell / services you offer (brief description of your 

company):

Like eBay, a marketplace for buyers and sellers to come together 

to list and buy used books, DVDs, music, and video games.

Have you always wanted to run your own business? 

What were some of your previous jobs / companies?

After nearly 15 years in the corporate world, I wanted to 

apply my knowledge & experience from companies like 

PepsiCo into a much faster-paced environment where I 

could personally impact the business and place my own 

fingerprint and signature on the growth of a brand.

Have you got any qualifications? Please tell us about

yourself academically?

Columbia MBA, 5 years at PepsiCo, subsidiary of AT&T, 

2 billion national retailer; ran $40 million marketing budget,

won national awards in marketing.

How / when did the idea of your website / company 

come about?

I wasn’t the founder, but the story as it goes from the founder

Josh Kopelman’s lips is something like this … he and his wife

were surfing eBay.com and noticed this huge supply of John 

Grisham books on eBay without any bids. At this point in time,

there was no “Buy it Now” functionality on eBay. He surmised

that no one wanted to go through the then hassle of bidding for

a commodity item like a book…they wanted to pay a fixed 

amount for a used book or DVD —  and wanted to buy it on 

the spot like you could at Amazon. 

Josh asked quite a few people how much they would be willing 

to pay and people kept saying “about half” The name and concept

was born.  Later on…once the site was launched, people told us it

was OK if things were priced a little more than Half price if they 

could get a wider selection…so we broke our strict half price 

model but almost all the items today on the site are half price.

If you could give readers of this book one piece of advice

what would it be?

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