Ormita is the only barter exchange run and managed by economists.

Barter exchanges rest on a logic which is almost alien to our conventional economy.

The savings able to be achieved through excess capacity trading are not always obvious as individuals tend to compare 1 Barter Dollar to 1 local currency Dollar when the actual cost to create a barter dollar is always significantly less than the cost to create a single local cash Dollar.

Barter exchange operators tend to be sole individuals with little, or no, knowledge of basic economic principles and procedures.

While the idea of operating a barter exchange may be appealing, the fact is that the exchange itself is a parallel monetary system with greater complexities than the normal cash marketplace.

There are no industry-standard guidelines (or methods of enforcement) for membership, for sustainable trade creation, for credit criteria and control, for data security, for ethnics and so on….

Worse still, with many exchange operators having collapsed shortly after starting up the industry sometimes has a bad name as potential users perceive it to be “high risk”.

In short, sole operators can not afford to develop the systems and tools to run (or appear to run) with the same level of operational strictness and security as a bank; despite the fact that this is, essentially, one of their key functions.

The fact is that very few barter exchange owners understand basic economic principles of monetary supply and demand.

Independent barter exchanges are labour intensive operations as they often require more time to find, discuss and close a deal.

This is usually a by-product of the following:

• Incomplete information on members offerings; and

• Lack of knowledge or differentiation of those members who are obligated to sell and those who wish to spend down; and

• It is time consuming to collect all the information from each seller directly and even more difficult to mine data without a coherent platform; and

• Difficult to find out about others experiences with the seller; and

• Exchange owners and members are often unaware who is obligated to trade and who is not; and

• Sellers may be located further away than other cash suppliers leading to perceived ‘cost’ differences; and

• Sole operators operate in silos which gives members the perception that they are often the only seller of those goods or services and they may price accordingly (i.e. not in line with their cash market prices) ; and