How TBBN works

TBBN (Trade By Barter Network) is exchange infrastructure, not a marketplace — identity federation, listing exchange, trade matching, offer management, checkout orchestration, notifications, and the SDKs/widgets/docs that expose all of it. tbbnetwork.com, the consumer- facing marketplace, is the first real customer of that same API — the same relationship Stripe Checkout has to the Stripe API, or the Shopify Storefront has to the Shopify Platform.

Two products

Trade Engine is the barter side — listings, offers, matching, and trade sessions through to checkout and fulfillment. Merchants (ecommerce platforms, marketplaces, consignment and thrift software, classifieds, social-commerce apps) integrate it via API, SDK, or an embeddable widget.

Space is a separate product: a network of real, bookable locations for meeting up or dropping off an item. It has its own API, independent of Trade Engine, and can be integrated on its own — see the Space API guide.

Where money actually moves

TBBN never takes a cut of a trade's value. For a trade's own settlement — payment, taxes, commissions, shipping, fulfillment, returns, disputes, refunds — that's entirely your own checkout, end to end; TBBN reserves items and orchestrates the handoff, nothing more. See the integration walkthrough's section on checkout for exactly what your endpoint needs to do.

TBBN does hold and move real money in two places: your SaaS plan (see Pricing), and TBBN Space's booking payments, which TBBN collects from the trader and pays out to the host less a commission.

Identity

Every registered TBBN user has one account — called a Seller when trading on the network. A seller can be linked to more than one merchant (e.g. they trade through your platform and a competitor's) without those merchants seeing each other's data about them; TBBN just recognizes it's the same person underneath. See the Glossary for the exact terms this system uses.