Swap toys your children have finished with.
Children outgrow things on a schedule and the loft fills up on the same one. Almost none of it is broken and almost none of it is wanted — by you. Someone two years behind you wants all of it, and has the thing you are about to buy.
The bundle is the thing worth listing
A single toy is a hard thing to swap and an easy thing to give away. The listings that move here are the ones that solve somebody's whole stage at once: the full set of track, the crate of building blocks, the complete run of a series.
That is also what we can value properly. A named set with a model number gives us something to anchor on. A carrier bag of assorted plastic gives us nothing, and we will say so rather than invent a band for it.
The exception is anything collectable — a retired plush, a boxed figure, a discontinued set. Those hold value on their own and are worth listing on their own.
Photograph it assembled and say what is missing, because everyone asks. Name the set and the maker if it has one. Say whether it can post or needs collecting — anything big enough to matter usually needs collecting, and saying so up front is what stops a swap falling apart at the end.
The questions people ask first.
Almost all of it, and that is the point. Condition is on every listing, from poor to like-new, and it feeds into the band — a worn one and a boxed one do not sit in the same place.
Mark it collection-only and we handle it from there. If anything in a swap needs collecting, the whole swap is treated as a collection and we do not propose it to somebody on the other side of the country.
No. What your children have outgrown can just as easily become a drill, a bike or a coat. The bands are what let two completely different things sit on the same scale.
Nothing here has a price.
Barterama is a barter marketplace: a swap site where value is shown as a band rather than a figure, and where no money changes hands at any point. Every item sits in one of twelve bands that we work out — you never set your own, and neither does the person you are swapping with. If we are not confident, the band gets wider rather than more precise.
Where two sides do not quite balance, a small extra item closes the gap. Cash never does, and there is no balance or credit on this site to close it with.