BarterNet Rounds Out Its U.S. Affiliations

BarterNet Corporation announced the affiliation of three additional United States trade exchanges to their network. The exchanges are Eagle Barter in Chattanooga, Tennessee; Barter Business Exchange in Raleigh, North Carolina; and The EXchange in Orlando, Florida.

These Southeast affiliations complete the first round of BarterNet's affiliations in the United States. The three exchanges plan to merge with BarterNet at a later date.

"Now we can offer our clients services which would have been well out of reach if we were not part of the BarterNet network," declared Scott Whitmer, president of The EXchange in Orlando. "I can get on the phone and trade a client's Florida hotel rooms for 100 lobsters from Maine and a cruise in Alaska, this would not have been practical in the past."

Whitmer also stated that "BarterNet's plan is very different from pure internet-play barter organizations, in that they combine the local flavor of the existing exchanges with the power of the Internet."

Editor's Note: The current issue of BarterNews has an extensive cover story on BarterNet, a company backed by Wand Partners, Alignment Capital, and the partners of Parthenon Capital. See our home page for (a look at) the cover and Editor's Note on BarterNet.

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This Kind Of Coverage We Don't Need!

The September 11 issue of Forbes magazine had a two-page article titled, "Swap 'Til You Drop...Or Drop Out." Then it went on to say, "It took humans thousands of years to emerge from the barter system. Does bringing it back online make sense?"

The author, Robert Goff, goes on to tell of his registering with the most popular consumer-to-consumer barter sites. Goff says he couldn't find much and when he did, he said, "It's rare that the person who has the watch I covet will want any of the things I want to unload."

The balance of the article wasn't any better. For instance, "online swapping is aggravating, unnecessary, and anything but efficient. It's a hungry consumer of that most precious commodity: time."

And one of Goff's final remarks was, "I concluded that barter on the Web was one of those ideas that sounds great in theory, but doesn't work in practice."

Editor's Note: A couple of observations are important to point out here. First, the article was focused entirely on consumer-to-consumer barter, not business-to-business barter. One-on-one barter, whether on the web or in person has proved to be difficult, which is why the trade exchanges and corporate barter companies have achieved a growing prominence within the business community.

Secondly, the sweeping statement that barter on the web doesn't work in practice, didn't take into account the business-to-business barter sites. They are working very diligently to make barter on the web an integral part of the commercial barter industry.

Unfortunately, Forbes' 800,000 circulation (millions of readers) will most likely make a fleeting judgment about barter from the negative headline and story.