For this month’s website review I decided to take a short shopping trip at half.com, a shopping site that is a division of the popular shopping site Ebay. My boyfriend, Matthew, helped out by picking one of his engineering books for class, and told me the title, edition, and last name of the author of the book. I also did not see the book at all so I had no idea what the book itself looked like.

Since I was literally going into this shopping trip blind, the first thing that came to my mind when I came to half.com was to use the conveniently placed search bar at the top of the page. I was a woman on a mission, and did not even bother to scroll down past the Featured Books section of the homepage. After putting in the title and the author’s last name into the search bar, several results came up. They all looked to be the correct book, but I was not able to tell from the search what edition they were.

Matthew had pointed out to me, “why not just put the edition in the search bar?” But, in my mind, since I got a number of supposedly correct results; I could just click on one, check the edition, and then either go back to try again or continue on my merry way. Luckily, the first result I chose turned out to be the edition needed, so I proceeded to add the book to my cart via the obvious green “add to cart” button next to the price I wanted.

At the shopping cart page, I found the layout to be quite clean and well put together. The items and checkout each had their own box, so it was very easy to tell what was in my cart and where I was to go when I was finished shopping. I decided I was done, so I proceeded to checkout. At this point, the site required I sign in, so Matthew put in his email since I did not have an account set up. Next came shipping information, and I was actually surprised that Matthew’s previous shipping address had been saved from the last time he ordered books, especially since we were not accessing this from his computer. He mentioned that the site probably links addresses to accounts so that was it would be more convenient for shoppers. Honestly, I think it works quite well.

At this point I stopped the shopping adventure; neither Matthew nor I were interested in putting our credit card numbers to simulate buying a book he already owned. Overall, I would say that was a fairly smooth shopping experience. The layout of the site was very straightforward for the browsing I wanted to do, especially the bright green buttons that lead me to the cart and checkout. However, there was one tiny problem I had with the cart. I decided that I wanted to remove the book from the cart. Finding the cart from the homepage was easy enough; the link sat right with the tabs with a cart icon next to it. But when I went back to the cart, I actually took me a few seconds to find the “remove from cart” link. Turns out it was directly underneath the book information, and in the same font and color as the book information. The removal did give an obvious green confirmation box above the list of items, so perhaps that somewhat makes up for the bit of searching I did for trying to clear my cart.

I have used half.com in the past to find books I’ve needed while attending school, and I probably will continue using it. But hopefully not too soon because; dang, books are freaking expensive.