'Let's Barter' is a new smartphone app whose name is fairly self-explanatory, in that it is designed to encourage people to go about trading and bartering their goods and services all from within the app's convenient interface.
Launched by a group of entrepreneurs based in India, the Let's Barter app essentially takes the well-known Let's Barter community on Facebook and leverages their power of numbers in the form of an app. The app allows you to connect with people located near you and message them from within the app in order to go about negotiating and bartering products and services.
This app is a great example of the latest smartphone technologies being used to facilitate and streamline a a very old-school way of doing business that is slowly but surely coming back into fashion.
What's Driving This Trend
- Mobile Bartering Apps
- Mobile apps are being developed to help consumers find opportunities to trade products and services without the need for money.
- Localized Trading Networks
- Territorialized applications will allow users to communicate and negotiate with other users in geographically close areas, stimulating proximity commerce.
- Social Media-based Commerce
- Social media platforms are increasingly becoming vehicles for commerce that enable social sharing and networking as a model for transactional exchange.
Who This Affects Most
- Mobile App Development
- Businesses specializing in mobile app development can capitalize on the trend of bartering, which offers opportunities to develop asynchronous communication, geolocation functionality, and user-to-user interaction features.
- Peer-to-peer Services
- Companies that specialize in constructing peer-to-peer services such as Airbnb can learn from the challenges and opportunities of mobile bartering apps for enhancing the customer experience and expanding the user base.
- Social Media Platforms
- Social media platforms can reproduce the success of Facebook's Let's Barter community by incorporating virtual marketplaces for bartering into their own applications, and thus, increase user engagement through alternative means of generating values.
