This post was contributed by a community member. The views expressed here are the author's own.

Business & Tech

Swap.com Introduces an Old Form of Commerce to a New Market

A new South End start-up is pulling cash out of the equation in favor of the good old barter system.

“What’s it worth to ya?”

I can say in all assurance after years of bargaining on ebay, the answer is likely a fair bit less than you’d hoped for.

But what if cash value wasn’t part of the equation? What if you were merely exchanging goods—goods of any legal kind—for other goods? You could switch out the things you merely wanted yesterday for the items you genuinely need today… and bypass that disruptive middleman, the almighty dollar, while you’re at it.

Interested in local real estate?Subscribe to Patch's new newsletter to be the first to know about open houses, new listings and more.

This is some of the thinking that’s gone into a new South End based company called Swap.com, and it’s already attracting major attention: Mayor Menino chose the burgeoning start-up as one of 11 businesses honored this year with his coveted Green Business Award. Swapping, after all, is a form of recycling. But it’s more than that. Actually, the absence of monetary exchange creates a completely different sort of marketplace than what we’re used to in this country.

The lack of need for cash is quite liberating indeed.

Interested in local real estate?Subscribe to Patch's new newsletter to be the first to know about open houses, new listings and more.

“There are millions of people around the world that participate in this age old form of commerce called swapping,” Swap.com CEO Jeff Bennett told me. “It is the essence of social commerce from my standpoint since the very basis of it is people connecting with other people to swap something.”

The premise couldn’t be more straightforward: there are ‘haves’ and there are ‘wants.’ With 1.9 million documented swaps (and counting) and some 13 million items ‘stocked,’ it’s safe to say that people are finding ways of satisfactorily matching ‘haves’ and ’wants’ with other Swap.com users. The website is the main hub, but there’s a live swap-meet component as well.

“With the advent of smart phones, there’s this incredible integration of local-social-photo-mobile technologies that enables swapping in both local and mass markets at the same time,” Bennett said. “So, we’ve gone out and acquired the most descriptive domain name we could find to build a category leading company... ‘Swap.com.’ In the past year, we’ve combined the largest online swap market with the leading offline swap events business, and have just launched a super cool iPhone app.”

The potential extends far beyond your old jackets and CDs, however. For instance, Bennett and Co. have initiated a Swap4Schools program which is designed to match swappers' haves’ with schools' wants’ (which Bennett is quick to point out are more likely ‘needs’).

It works like this: to enlist in the program, school administrators, teachers, and librarians can create a free account and build a list of media items needed for their classroom. Any Swap.com members who own those items - or other community members who join in the cause – will be alerted via e-mail if a school is in need of one of their listed items. Swap.com is waiving transaction fees for members who choose to make these donations, so there’s only the shipping cost to consider.

“By uniting our online community of over one million swappers with teachers in need of books, CDs, and movies, we believe that Swap4Schools will truly help to improve public education in America,” Bennett said while addressing the media at the program’s recent launch.

In the month (barely) since then, Swap4Schools has already expanded to serve hundreds of schools in 41 states – it’s extended well beyond Boston, and is obviously proving to be a very useful tool. The site's overall membership doubled from 2009-2010, increasing from approximately 500,000 members to over 1 million across the country. And members are estimated to have collectively saved approximately $12 million over buying items brand new. Bennett believes this is just the beginning, and he's likely right… most of us have ‘stuff,’ we just don’t have a lot of cash.

“The great thing about Swap versus all other secondary markets is that the item itself is the currency,” he explained. “Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and there is little friction since there’s little to no cash involved. This is incredibly important in building market liquidity. It’s also a great solution for the new world that we live in. We’ve just come out of an intoxicating era of binging and hyper-consumption, so there are literally billions of inventory items possible for this kind of market.”

We’ve removed the ability to reply as we work to make improvements. Learn more here

The views expressed in this post are the author's own. Want to post on Patch?

More from South End