I was considering putting together a bartering site for business services. I have seen it done in other "product" driven industries and was wondering whether you thought it would work in the service industry. If you provide a service you would get credits and those credits could be used to buy other services. I think the revenue would have to be based upon an advertising model. What are your thoughts on this idea?

I think the biggest challenge with your idea is the revenue model. It is very difficult to make any money on just advertising give the cost that you will incur in developing the site because it will be pretty complex as well as the advertising cost you will incur to get visitors to your site.

I agree I think the website would be pretty complex given you have record credit account balance and track deposits and debits of barter credits. I am also not sure of the overall viability because I could picture a situation where you provide a website to someone and get the credits but there is not a service you want to spend the credits on.

I think you are entering a new market which is very difficult but very rewarding if you get it right. It is much easier to barter for a physical item because you can usually put a price on the item and you get what you pay for. With a service it tends to be more difficult to price and the what you get depends on the service deliverer which we all know can be highly variable.

The major question that I have is why would someone want to barter their services if they can get hard cold cash? If they were that desparate for business they may not be that good at what they do. On the other hand if you are highly profitable why limit yourself to firms that barter their services. I am sure that there is a niche and it could be successful but these are some things to consider.

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I agree with Wedding role I would approach this cautiously or else you will have a bunch of mediocre providers that will soon be out of business.