An online website, i1515.com, similar to Craigslist that initiated in the US as a free classified ads portal, in handling barter trade in China, recently opened up in the city of Harbin, the Heilongjiang provincial capital, with an eye on greater cross-border e-business with Russia with hundreds of Russian enterprises already registered.

The Russians plan to trade in whatever they have, from beef, mutton, and beer to rice and sausages to oil paintings with expectations that this will help reduce local enterprise overstocking of commodities and ease some of their financial pressure.

The i1515.com plan also calls for the opening of 20 regular trade supermarkets to open in Harbin and eventually growing to 80 so that locals can bring their goods to these physical supermarkets for barter, while getting a price evaluation from experts.

By the early 1990s, the barter trade with Russia was already heating up, with profiteers to be found everywhere in Heilongjiang and neighboring areas of what was then the Soviet Union. But, now, compared with that early trade, the new system provides a unique business mode that combines business-to-business (B2B) and online-to-offline (O2O) and surplus stocks can be traded on the website for either products or services, such as office equipment or facilities, or employee welfare or advertising.