I saw this on a designer’s site today.
Tradia is a colossal time and money-waster. You’ll do much better to stick with eBay and PayPal. We signed up thinking it would be a good way to garner local customers for our hosting business, but at the end of the day Tradia appears to be little more than an outlet for random odds-and-ends that you typically find in the back of a Ross discount outlet. Basically you’ll end up trading real work in exchange for the opportunity to purchase mismatched towels and musical dolls.
Still, I wouldn’t be complaining here except that now we’re trying to cancel our account and they are being asshats about it. They won’t accept an email cancellation, instead they are insisting we fax them a signed document (which they don’t have a form for) to terminate our account. I love retro, but frankly the 90′s hasn’t come round again just yet, so I’m fresh out of facsimile machines and I get annoyed thinking about driving to a Kinkos to send them what amounts to a photocopy of a scribble on a blank piece of paper. It stinks of “delay tactic”.
Even Tradia members are finding out that their system does nothing.
I too have had a bad experience with Tradia. I own a web development company and a good friend was involved so I signed up really to help support a friend, and I thought what can it hurt.
The main problem is that you really can’t trade anything, not even travel. I think people really get tired of doing work for free, so they soon become unavailable. As for me I really cannot build the next Amazon all on trade. So the concept doesn’t work and Tradia isn’t a marketing company so don’t think that they can help you increase brand awareness.
So you maybe thinking well quit the program! Well I’ve tried and there always seems to be a reason why I can’t. I paid my dues told them I wanted to quit, sent them an email requested to no longer be a member. They said okay but you still have credit you might as well use; so I did use a small amount of my credit (as it is hard to use because no one wants to trade) for an item I really didn’t want but thought I might as well, well that trade created a “script” as they call it and now I owe them another $50+ and because of that I’m still a member incurring fees every month. So I told them give away my credits and I can do that but that will cost $250+ to donate them to a charity. Save your time and your money and find another barter group to join if you really want to trade!