Online trading community


An online trading community provides participants with a structured method for trading, bartering, or selling goods and services. These communities often have forums and chatrooms designed to facilitate communication between the members. An online trading community can be likened electronic equivalent of a bazaar, flea market, or garage sale.

History

One of the earliest trading sites on the internet was Game Trading Zone. The domain name ugtz.com was implemented in an independent database in the spring 1999. This was a departure from simply listing items on a forum or text document. The database helped traders by showing them a list of potential trading matches, and showed historical transactions as well.

Formal trading communities

A formal trading community consists of a website or network of websites that facilitate and track trade transactions. Some websites, such as the video game trading site Goozex, charge transactional fees per trade, while other similar sites such as GameTZ do not.
Key elements of formal trading communities
There are several community based websites that have a broader scope and lend themselves to a trading environment.
Some online trading communities have the specific rules adopted by the users of that community, and though they can differ most have settled upon a few standard practices:
A trading circle is a form of online trading designed to facilitate viewing of television series and episodic media. Physical media such as videocassettes, DVDs and CDs are exchanged via mail. Each member agrees to pass an episode on to the next member in a timely fashion, thereby allowing all members of the group to view the series. This communal trading method is also used by special interest clubs. Some of these groups include anime clubs.

Trading Portal

Within global financial markets, an electronic trading platform gives investors who are part the online trading community a greater choice of stock exchanges or other trading networks.

Examples