Bartering is almost always looked upon as an old-fashioned means of exchange that was superseded because money is far more efficient. After all, in a monetary system an apple grower who needs shoes simply has to find a cobbler. In a pure barter system the apple grower would have to find not just any cobbler but one who happened to want apples at that time. Thus, in just about all civilizations, money came to play an important role. However, the inconvenience of bartering was just one factor, and in many places was probably not the most significant one.

Bartering and money are not completely incompatible. One of the most important improvements over the simplest forms of early bartering was the tendency to select one or two particular items in preference to others so that the preferred bartered items became partly accepted because of their qualities in acting as media of exchange although, of course, they still could be used for their primary purpose of directly satisfying the wants of the traders concerned.

Bartering still plays an important role in trade with countries whose currencies are not readily convertible, e.g. the communist countries during the cold war. At the retail level bartering has become the main means of exchange on occasions when currencies have collapsed completely as a result of hyperinflation, e.g. in Germany after the two world wars.

It is also worth noting that the free exchange of information over the Internet could also be regarded as a form of gift-exchange, a version of bartering.