the idea germinated in my mba, and i know its not the most original of idea, but a quick search on the net didn't throw up any results. plus if i remember correctly it was an idea given by Soni and Sudeep, which i built on. well i remember clearly that i bartered 5-star pencil caps when i was in standard I.
well anyways here goes...
we all end up with a lot of things that we don't have, and things that others have and we want. and we are ready to exchange. so how about a Web site which enables bartering.
the UI et al will be like any online shopping site, ebay maybe, where every user can have his/her own page. they can upload things that they want to offer, a coffee mug with a dogs pic, a nirvana t-shirt, anything which they think someone might want. in another section they can also have a 'i want' items.
the matching engine in the background matches the 'on offer - i want' alerts, on the fly mind you, of course there will be search and browse features.
so once a match is done, the next two things will be a fair value, and actual trial (you don't really know if the mug is really that good).
for the fair value, there can be a negotiation engine which is built in, in which first i offer something in exchange, which i deem is a fair exchange, if i don't have anything, then i can supplement it with money as well.
This is followed limited round of negotiations, if negotiations fail, then the engine automatically prematurely closes the transaction.
if the negotiations are successful, then comes the trial part. Here both parties, through the service's appointed couriers, send the items. the question here is, what about security. what if i don't like what she sent, but she likes what i sent it and keeps it. I am stuck with something i don't like...here's comes the funda of a security deposit, and one of the ways the service makes money. each party deposits some money with the service, this can be transaction based (higher amount) or membership based (lower amount but for longer period). the service ensures, that if she doesn't return what she liked, or doesn't take back what i didn't like, i get a monetary compensation.
of course if everything is fine, the service just returns the money (without the interest part mind you, that where we make money). same when both parties don't like it. but here there is a transaction fees to cover the courier costs.
and why our own couriers, so that none of the parties can claim that they received damaged goods...
and yea till the transaction is completed successfully, no revealing of names, address, phone no's et al, they might by pass the service completely...
how does that sound...its a good business idea, but one problem I see is, for the service to make money, the number items to be exchanged have to be huge and very diverse, so that their are a sizable number of transactions.
also the items listed should be high value...makes more sense. Mugs and Tee's won't really work, Picasso paintings would!!!
and i know i know, ebay is already doing something similar, but then here, the selling point is barter system. you many times are ready to barter something instead of paying for it...
and btw if you wanna freak out, the matching engine, well it doesn't have to necessarily match between two users...it can be a chain of matches, an AI algo can easily do this.
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