Making that swap: Barter is smarter

Here is a website that has given new life to the age-old practice of bartering. The website, which is also available as an app for mobile users, enables customers to barter or exchange the goods they own for another product of a different application. 

“All you have to do is type in your email ID and create an account on the website. Then, upload pictures of the products you want to sell and step three, wait to get requests from other users who are interested to barter,” explains NR Venkatesan, director and founder of Barterkiya. From home appliances, electronic gadgets to accessories, books and games, one can barter any product they deem suitable on the site for any other item of your choice. 

“My son wanted to exchange his smartphone on a shopping portal and he was disappointed with the bids people made,” says 50-year-old Venkatesan. He then decided to develop a platform where people can exchange unused goods for another product from another person. 

His main purpose was to offer people an alternative platform to trade in second-hand products at reasonable prices. “In second-hand markets, people are taken for a ride. They don’t even get back half the original price and are cheated by middlemen who gain a heavy profit out of these transactions. We wanted to completely eliminate a third party from coming between seller and buyer,” he says. Barterkiya is currently self-funded and will be seeking venture capital funding in the future. 

Money – in one form or another -- has been an integral part of human history for the last 3,000 years, and it is ironical that it is the contemporary world, rapidly moving towards cash-free transactions, that triggered the idea of barter in Venkatesan’s mind. But the name for the portal did not come easy. “We were trying out different domain names with the word ‘barter’, but most of them were already taken. Then one of my relatives suggested using my son’s pet name, ‘kiya’, as a suffix. This was a unique combination and it just clicked for us,” he says.

Name and form apart, Venkatasan is up against much more before he can think of making profits. “I want to first institutionalise the concept of bartering. My partners and I don’t mind spending some money on this as we are just testing the waters now. We are planning to launch the second phase in two years’ time, which will include e-auctions, paid listings and offering repair services by linking mechanics to customers to tweak their products before selling them,” he says. 

Hand-me-downs hold an allure all their own – we all seem to want what somebody else has – but doing this online usually brings the quality of the product centre stage.