I’ve 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 single location retail family business 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 designer jewelry, becoming a sizable enterprise with many employees, designers, inside and outside sales reps, and our very own manufacturing facility with 15 artisans.

We were able to use barter to reduce cash requirements for business travel to attend trade shows, pay for hotel accommodations, catalog 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, services, hotel accommodations, and real estate.

I would venture to say that our team of eleven trade and travel brokers were the most successful retail barter exchange in New York City in the history of barter.

From there, it was a natural progression 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 companies eliminate losses and write downs by receiving full value for their excess inventories and unsold capacity.

My fascination with computers technology, alternative currencies, and digital money 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 and only 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 white label branded world class global online Internet trade exchange management system and ecommerce enabled trade marketplace. It was designed to empower 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, which you can certainly do yourself if you had the right software.

Today, version 6.0 of the VirtualBarter software enables anyone to start a new online barter exchange overnight for as little as $85/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  answered these and other questions over and over again; just to contribute to the cause… enabling barter payments to be accepted worldwide, as if it were no different than handing a merchant your credit or debit card.

So today, I decided to create “Learn”, give back, and reveal the basic secrets of successful barter. Stay tuned, as we’re just getting started.

BK | BarterPro