Safe way to trade online?

I see a lot of "For Trade/FT" listings, how do people do ukulele trade transactions online? Is there a broker or company providing the service? What's the best way to protect myself?

On another similar topic, do local ukulele stores typically accept trades? If I have a nice concert uke, but want to trade for a tenor size, am I better off trying to sell it instead?

Thanks in advance for any advice given!

I do not know of a brokerage service. I suppose you could treat it like two separate sales and run the transactions through PayPal, but is it worth it? I dunno. I have done only one uke trade and it was with a fellow UU member. After discussions, we decided a straight trade was fair and both sides seemed like trustworthy individuals, so we shipped at about the same time and that was the end of it. It worked out great. Could the other guy have just not shipped, got my uke, and disappeared into the night? Sure. It's a risk. In most cases, it's an acceptable risk, but talk it out with your prospective trader, and if anything seems "off", you can always back out.

As far as the trade vs sell to a "dealer", it's the same as anything else. You will almost always get more money out of a sale, but the trade might be more convenient.

I'm not seeing many trading threads here, actually. Most folks just buy or sell.

For selling and buying there is some protection through the payment service, though in all cases (trading included) the best protection is to deal only with people you are comfortable with. This makes it more tricky for people who are new to the community or who aren't actively participating, though references may help (activity on other instrument forums, ebay profile, etc) may help, if they can be verified.

I've bought three instruments from regulars here and sold three to a forum member. Everything went fine (more than fine, really, extremely good communication from everyone). I'd happily trade with the folks on here also, but there aren't as many opportunities for this in Europe, especially with the higher cross-country shipping costs. The German ukulele club has a loan service where locals can request one of the loaner ukes and gang onto it until someone else requests it. That seems to work well for them, though it's just cheaper ukes. Still, always thought that would be nice for on here too, but it wouldn't work internationally.

I've done a few trades on UU and never had a problem. The best I could do is check the member's length of time on UU, contact thru UU, and have exchanged phone numbers. We agree on a mutual time to ship and then I make a copy of my shipping ticket to the UU member and visa versa. Always went smooth and have had a nice chat to boot. I go in knowing that nothing is absolute.

As Jim says, I'd stick with UU members. We're easy to trade with, and I bet you never get screwed. I've done it twice, with very good results.

Ive done a trade as well as a donation in exchange for shipping cost.
With the trade we just sent the ukes, zero problems. Same with the uke I sent as a donation, that member trusted me to do it.

I've done 5 trades so far. In my case, If we did not know each other from the UU forum, we exchanged copies of Driver's license, outlined the details in email exchanges, chose shipping method, and shipped on the same day. If we had references from the UU forum, then we eliminated the need to exchange driver's license. I have had no problems.