Hey Waccoites,
I am a newly graduated massage therapist with 625 hours of training, and I am good at it.
In getting started I have been thinking that making regular trading or bartering part of my business plan is a great idea. To that end someone recommended that I find barter organizations so I went trawling through google.
What I found was interesting. With just a couple of exceptions most of the good looking barter organizations were prohibitively expensive for someone in my price range. Many of them included a sign up fee from $400 - $900, monthly maintenance fee's, and a fee per transaction that was about 7% for both seller & buyer.
However, I found some exceptions and figured I would offer them here for anyone interested.
https://www.barterbucks.us/. This organization offer free sign up, no monthly maintenance and 5% transaction fee for both buyer and seller. That would make it a total of 10% transaction fee of course.
Signing in to their service I found there is a lot of good stuff offered in the greater bay area, although less right here in Sonoma. Part of my purpose with this post is to make more folks from Sonoma aware of the option.
I was actually impressed when I signed in. They reviewed my information before accepting me into the network, and then I got a personal call from the person who runs it helping me get set up. Nice with some human interaction online! Also - I would be stupid not to mention this, if you sign up on my recommendation please use my name when you do. It is Malene Comes. I get a bit of money to trade with when you start your own trading.
Another organization I found is www.massageexchange.com for massage therapists wanting to swap massages. There is a pretty good local representation there. You can sign up for free, but to actually get trading with them there is a small sign up fee. It was approximately $5 per month depending on which plan you chose.
I hope to see several of you there!
Malene