You can barter for skills and education online!

I read about Shareshop (www.shareshop.com.au) in our local paper and was immediately drawn to the concept of sharing and trading skills and experience online. Having retired within the past 12 months I was keen to continue utilising my skills and feeding my creativity and passion for helping others. I visited the website and joined immediately. It offered me a unique opportunity to trade my skills with others and in return tap into other services with no cost involved.

Since joining and reading further, I have grown to love the philosophy of Shareshop founder and director, Kym Foster, who says, “One of the greatest gifts that people give each other is to share their knowledge.”

I decided to put my creative skills on show on my membership post, offering re-usable satin bows for all occasions. A friend gave the pattern to me more than 25 years ago and I have been making them for family and friends for all that time.

Since joining Shareshop I have earned enough points to regularly use the services of other members and as a retiree on ‘limited’ funds, find the benefits invaluable. We all have skills and experience that are unique, so why not share these without the exchange of money.

I met Kym in person when she came to my home to view and purchase numerous bows from me. She impressed me as an amazing and caring person and I was delighted when she approached me to have a blog written on my products – visit it here.
The concept of Shareshop was built to its current vibrant and ever-growing state over three years. While it appears simple, and is easy to use, it required a lot of work to get it to that stage.

As stated on the site: ‘You can share your skills based on education, employment or life experiences, talents or even a favourite hobby or perhaps products that are new, used homemade, grown, or for hire. The concept allows members to have an online account that calculates the value of the products or services that is $1 is the equivalent of one point. Points are exchanged or traded for other services.

‘Before the concept of money entered the minds of human beings in the day, a system called ‘barter’ was in effect people traded things they had for things they didn’t have to survive.

‘Visitors of shareshop are required to be members to be part of the online community but there is no subscription charge to be regular member. There are, however, two other types of membership, gold and silver, which are paid memberships. Gold $65 and silver $35. The advantage of being gold or silver members is that you are given 60 and 30 points to start with as well as a featured blog post, notice board listing space and business listings on the link page.’

For me, Shareshop epitomises my sense of value and respect of other people’s skills.  I am impressed with the quality of the website and the efficient response from the site admin.

The best way to make Shareshop work for you is to become a member and find interested people in your community who would like to join. This will ensure you have a range of services that are available for you to use your points in your local community. However, the opportunities are endless and the more members we have the better the opportunities for everyone to share their skills and experience in an online community Australia-wide.

As stated on Shareshop: ‘Shareshop is an Australia-wide online market place where you can buy and sell anything without using money. It is an online community that provides members with an alternative way of earning a ‘value’ for something that in turn can be used as ‘payment’ for something else – without having to conform to commercial market place restrictions.’

 Are you interested in furthering your skills and education? Tell us why in the comments below…