I have been involved with barter in one way or another for over 35 years… I initially started trading my company’s products for local cable and TV advertising in New York City. Bartering our excess inventory for advertising enabled me to grow our small family business at one location to three stores with ten employees in less than five years.
Several years later, we joined a local barter exchange and expanded our trade horizons even more. We started importing and manufacturing to supply our stores and then other stores with fine designer jewlery, becoming a sizable enterprise with many employees, designers, an inside and outside sales force and our very own factory. We were able to use barter to reduce cash requirements for travel, hotel accommodations, printing, construction services, and other business expenses.
Many years later after leaving the family business, I started my own barter exchange in New York City. Within seven years, our exchange had over 700 business members trading over $16 million a year in products and services. I could venture to say that we were the most successful retail barter exchange in New York City in the history of barter.
From there it was a natural to venture into corporate barter, becoming the principal in a transaction rather than a broker facilitating trades between members of an exchange. This led to facilitating many multi-million dollar transactions for larger companies, which greatly helped the companies that did them.
My love for computers and technology, enforced by the fact that trading needed to be facilitated online in order for barter to become mainstream, led me in 1999 to design and develop TradeBanc, an online marketplace that at the time, broke down the barriers to trade. TradeBanc was the first online global trade marketplace. It actually empowered barter exchanges to enable their members to learn about trade opportunities and then facilitate online barter transactions seamlessly even between different members of different exchanges throughout the world.
I then designed and developed VirtualBarter, a branded world class global online Internet trade exchange management system and e-commerce enabled trade marketplace. It was designed to enable anyone to start their own barter exchange without the typical large upfront cost, to automate administrative tasks so that one or two people can run and manage a 300+ member exchange, and to eliminate the need to affiliate with a large national exchange network that takes 20-50% of your earnings just for providing accounting and collection services that you can certainly do yourself if you had the right software. Today, version 3.0 of the VirtualBarter software enables anyone to start a new online exchange overnight for as little as $65/month.
For years, people have emailed or called me and posed many questions about starting up a barter exchange, wanting to know what are the best practices, how do you get the first few members, what type of members should they target, and most important, how do you start making money. I have answered these and other questions over and over again; just to contribute to the cause… getting barter to be accepted worldwide as if it were no different than giving a merchant your credit card. So today, I decided to start this blog, give back, and reveal the basic secrets of successful barter.
BK
BarterPro
Bruce,
Thought I’d share that our book was covered in the USA Weekend! http://www.usaweekend.com/article/20100806/MONEY/8080301/-1/health/Bartering-can-help-you-save-big-bucks
I hope all is well in your world!