Bartering started as early as the cavemen era but it has died down today mainly because we use cash or credits for almost everything that we want. But then again…
Siddharth S. Kumar, who is also the founder of PixelKraft and Moodler, wants to revive the glory days of bartering. In order to do that, he created Bartr.in as an experiment. The simple platform is solely focused on barter-based trading, with items selection powered by Freebase, which is an open source entity graph for people, places and things (see picture above).
Users can exchange their unwanted goods for anything they want. In conversation with Siddharth he gave me this example: “Willis Wee has Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix and wants a Whopper in return.” And then, hopefully, the site would hook me up with someone who likes the sound of my deal.
If you’re pretty open to suggestions on what to accept in exchange, then users can do a quick search on Bartr.in to browse what items are available for trading.
This idea sounds like an exciting one. Bartr.in can arguably be considered a consumer-to-consumer (C2C) e-commerce platform but without the need to go through with an actual financial transaction. It’s essentially goods being exchanged for goods, which is best suited to countries like Indonesia where an online payment infrastructure hasn’t yet been established.
Even in mature e-commerce markets like Japan and Singapore, you cannot find sites that support bartering, where users can precisely point to the items they want to exchange.
Regrettably, Bartr.in, which just recently launched, doesn’t yet have many users to really test out the concept. If you think you might find online trading fun, head over to Bartr.in to give it a shot. And feel free to give us your feedback too.
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