Barter for Something Instead of Nothing

Studies show that over 30% of businesses engage in some form of barter…this for that…in direct trade. For instance, my husband has been seeing a chiropractor and while he was there, he saw that several of their mechanized massage tables were broken down. My husband offered to fix the tables in lieu of paying copays, and the Dr. was more than happy to barter it! This is an example of direct trading…this for that. The Dr. saves paying a service technician, and my husband saves on copays!

Most business owners aren’t familiar with the concept of business trading, even though most businesses have excess left-over inventory, or unscheduled appointments or space eating away at their bottom line. Finding someone to trade what he or she has for what you have is hard. This is where indirect trading comes into play, with a trade exchange platform, such as IMS!

With IMS, your business sells its excess inventory or unused time slots or space to many different businesses, and earns “trade money” in return. The money earned is deposited into a “trade account”. A trade account is just like a bank account, in that your dollars earned are available to use to purchase products or services.

However, when you use your excess inventory or unused time slots to earn trade money, this means when you spend that that money, you are doing so at a discount. Here is how…

Let us say you are a gadget store. You bought a load of gadgets expecting to sell all of them at regular retail prices. As the year goes on, you find that you may have over-ordered inventory, and need to make space for next year’s order of gadgets. Typically, businesses start to discount the inventory to incentivize buyers. Eventually, the discounts get lower and lower until the profit margins on your gadgets disappear.

What if you are a service business? You have appointment slots to fill, and every time one of those slots go unfilled, you lose money. The same goes for space…if a hotel does not rent a room, a billboard does not rent the board, a restaurant is not renting their banquet halls, these are all lost revenues.

With IMS, you sell your gadgets at full retail pricing, no steep discounts! Your extra space and time is sold for full retail so you earn something instead of nothing. This means, when you go to spend your trade dollars, everything you buy is at a discount!

Next time you find yourself writing a check to get that table fixed, think to yourself…could I barter that?