What is Bartering?

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Bartering is the exchange of goods or services: the practice or system of exchanging goods and services. Bartering is distinct from selling, but can have a cash component...there is centuries old practice in bartering called "the boot." For example, "I will trade my horse for your mule and give you $200 to boot."

Bartering is completely legal. The only case in which it becomes illegal is if the recipient (e.g. Don Rickert Musical Instruments) of goods or services in exchange for cash value does not claim this cash value on their taxes.

If you wish to learn all of the ins and outs on bartering for goods and services, go to the website www.u-exchange.com and see their section on "Bartering 101." The founder of u-exchange.com, John C. Moore, was most helpful in providing the necessary information to get us started.

Hybrid Selling/Bartering

What we are offering our customers is not technically pure bartering, as we are selling goods at a negotiated reduced price and then bartering on the residual difference between the negotiated reduced sales price and the actual monetary value that we have assigned to the goods. You can call this a hybrid of selling and bartering or view it as two different activities: selling and then bartering. The difference is academic to us, but it is important to the top pure bartering sites such as www.u-exchange.com.

Bartering, goods, selling, services

Comments

[marco]

there is an even better bartering website called www.favorpals.com. i use it all the time and i have had great success. check it out.

[Don Rickert, Ph.D., IDSA]

Well, you see, it's like this. We are NOT attempting to establish a bartering site, of which there are many. Only a few are true bartering sites, which means simply exchanges goods/services for other goods/services. In true bartering, cash can be added to an offer...this case is called "the boot" in bartering terminology, which goes back centuries.

What we are doing is simply trying to make it easier for people to afford our instruments by allowing them to trade a good or service for a cash value (the difference between our price and the price the customer offers). That is technically not bartering and we would not even be allowed to do it on the premier bartering sites such as u-exchange.com.

Bottom line: we are using the term "bartering" very loosely and even state that it is a hybrid of selling and bartering.

I DO appreciate your comment and will check out the site you recommend, as we probably will be bartering some of the goods we receive in our "bartering" transactions and some old fiddles and bows that we want to move quickly,

All the best and thanks,

Don Rickert