Mfarhanonline Social Media News: The stock market might be on an up-and-down rollercoaster ride , but one type of startup that’s currently on the rise is barter sites — online operations where people can reuse, recycle or trade goods and services. Whether that has more to do with tighter family budgets or a trend toward greener purchases, a new-ish wave of entrepreneurs and philanthropists are attempting to exploit the apparent opportunity by launching sites where consumers can either trade their stuff for other things, get rid of unwanted items without clogging landfills, exchange their goods for money or do a little bit of each. Of course, Craigslist has long existed as a hub for this type of activity and eBay is a great place to unload your stuff for cash. But Craigslist has a fair amount of baggage attached to it, in part because of its use as a resource for prostitutes and johns , and eBay usually requires shipping, which means you’ll get less for items than you could otherwise. New barter sites, many with an emphasis on establishing local economies, address both concerns. In some cases, these sites are non-profits and aim to help the environment and help consumers save money. In other instances, the goal is to make money. Whatever the motivation, if you’re a consumer interested in exploring the barter economy, here are a few sites to consider: 1. PawnGo As the name implies, PawnGo isn’t so much a barter site as an online pawn shop. Todd Hills, the CEO of PawnGo, ran real pawn shops for years, but saw an opportunity online in 2007. “We started seeing a little different clientele in our brick and mortar stores starting in 2007,” he says. “They had very nice assets, but at the same time were very uncomfortable.” Hills speculated that such middle- and upper-middle class consumers saw too much of a stigma! attache d to traditional pawn shops, but that online would be a different story. It’s also a different sort of deal: Instead of just getting cash for their goods, PawnGo customers get loans. If you have, say, a piece of jewelry that PawnGo values at $10,000, you can get a 90-day loan for that amount or less at a 3-6% interest rate. Hills says the default rate for such loans is only around 15%. Hills’s hunch about the potential for online pawn appears to be paying off: The site did 500 deals in June. 2. ThredUp Children’s clothing is a unique market because the goods are highly perishable in one sense — the young ones outgrow them fairly quickly — but in reality, they can last for years. Savvy moms have known this for year and make a point of visiting second-hand stores where you can buy almost-new clothes for cheap. Eyeing this underground economy, James Reinhart created ThredUp earlier this year. Here’s how it works: When you join ThredUp, you get 10 boxes, which Reinhart says hold about 15 items each. When you want to get rid of clothes your kids have outgrown, you post them on the site. If someone indicates that they want the items, you mail them the box. If you want someone else’s box, it costs $15.95 in shipping plus a $5 fee, which goes to ThredUp. Reinhart says he’s looking to adapt the model to other items, like toys and consumer electronics, in the future. 3. Swap.com Swap.com bills itself as the world’s largest swap marketplace and claims about 1.2 million members. Swaptree, which focused on media like books and CDs, bought Swap.com last summer, but CEO Jeff Bennett named the combined company Swap.com. At the moment, the company is in freemium mode, though it makes some money from offline swap events. Bennett plans to broaden the business to include buy-and-sell transactions and collect a transaction fee. Bennett says he believes the future of barter is local. After all, those shipping fees can really kill your motivation to swap. You can narrow your search! down to your town with Swap.com and see what other local people want (the site includes pictures of the items.) You aren’t required to trade locally, though. To get started, Swap.com asks you to list the items that you have to trade and then the ones that you want. Then it matches you up with someone who has what you want and wants what you have. Simple as that. 4. U-Exchange If the economy every really does crash in a big way, U-Exchange could experience a renaissance. The Canada-based site, which has 67,000 members, seems to be more about bartering services than goods. For instance, a man in Ventnor, New Jersey posted recently seeking dental work in exchange for installing hardwood flooring. A lawyer in Marlton, New Jersey will do some legal work for a week at someone’s vacation house down the on the Shore. There are also goods exchanges — a man in Jersey City offered to swap a brand new Motorola Droid X for a used iPhone 4. U-Exchange gets a cut of some trades – there’s a one-time $5.99 for vehicles and boats and a permanent property exchange is $16.25 — but everything else is free. The site, which claims 1.2 million uniques a month, makes most of its money through advertising. 5. Freecycle Freecycle was started as a philanthropic venture and remains one to this day. Started by Deron Beal in Tucson, Arizona, in 2003, the organization originally recycled stuff that was being thrown away and gave it to local charities. “Thinking there had to be an easier way, Beal set up that first Freecycle e-mail group in a way that permitted everyone in Tucson to give and get,” a history on Freecycle’s site reads. In practice, the site isn’t much different than other barter sites: You can list things you want to get rid of, look for stuff other people are giving away or put the word out that you’re in the market for something. There are absolutely no fees. The company likens its business model to PBS and draws its income from a combination of advertising, grants and ! donation s. Image courtesy of Wikipedia Commons More About: Barter , craigslist , ebay , pawngo , Thredup For more Social Media coverage: Follow Mfarhanonline Social Media on Twitter Become a Fan on Facebook Subscribe to the Social Media channel Download our free apps for Android , Mac , iPhone and iPad Social Media reviews series maintain by Mayya
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