I have a bunch of books for sale on half.com (go buy some right now!) and the oddest thing has happened a number of times. I won’t get any sales for a period of time (6-8 weeks) and then, within hours of one another, two or three books off the virtual shelf.
I could understand these sales patters when I worked at a bookstore -- for some reason there'd be a snowball effect with customers coming up to the counter with their purchases. Whether it was because they didn't like being at the counter by by themselves, or the sound of a register reminded them they had to be somewhere else, or what.
But as far as I know there's no possibility of such a thing happening online -- a global 'books recently purchased' queue somewhere on the site, something. Wacky.
BTW: if you work at half.com, please add some navigational possibilities to the book listings. The current one -- only sorted by date I posted the book, only visible in groups of 25 -- is a huge disincentive to people buying multiple books at a time, trying to save some bucks on postage.