The history of Facebook Marketplace | Hacker News Reader

The history of Facebook Marketplace

lennysnewsletter.com

31 pointsyarapavan18 comments

I have used fb marketplace and it’s been great for buying and selling locally. But of course the default listing is polluted with a bunch of irrelevant crap from companies and very low quality ads. I haven’t found a way to set the default to local and for pickup only. The only thing I’m interested in is person to person transactions.

100% agree. Been trying to keep my eye out for retro game stuff and other tech things and you have to reset local pickup only after every search. The delivery ones are almost always scams or trash. I'm back to CL only now. Ebay is not so bad but prices are really over bid for everything.

What you want is not very relevant for Facebook, potential for growth is the only thing that matters. And that is a shame, because I see what you propose as a great service.

There are a few things that FB marketplace has going for it but #1 is the integration with messenger. The near friction-less ability for buyers to contact sellers and get a reply. This story is more about Craiglist doing nothing than FB innovation.

If Craigslist enabled chat it would clawback lost ground. But they seem to be ok with losing half their marketshare or more. it is sad.

Does anyone know the author's source is for determining various marketplaces' monthly active users?

I doubt that Facebook has exceeded Craigslist in overall marketplace activity in the US. Perhaps it's exceeded Craigslist on a world-wise basis but that's because Craigslist's user base is primarily North American-based.

Back when Facebook was more open with their Social Graph, it was possible for companies like AirBnB and Uber to create marketplaces that had the same access to the social proof that the person you were interacting with was legit.

Now, it’s not possible to build a competing marketplace with those mechanics given FB keeps the data siloed.

As someone who doesn’t want to use FB, are there any good alternatives to FB marketplace besides ebay?

Swappa, if you want to deal with their support team (I don't like them, lots of requests to get them to do one thing.), mecari (same fees as ebay, no difference imo.)

So unfortunately, not really.

Don't know there, but here in Latin America OLX and Mercadolibre are popular. The first is hugely based on trust (though their web experience is poor) as Facebook's Marketplace, and the latter has positioned by an aggresive SEO and marketing campaing, charging immense fees - but relatively secure for the buyer.

You’ll laugh, but newspaper classifieds. They are usually pretty cheap, and the people into buying used crap are still looking at classifieds for estate sales, etc.

Because you pay to list, the fraud is mostly nonexistent. Conversions are really high, about 60% of our church bazaar’s online sales came through the local paper. But the type of products and audiences would probably vary greatly… mom swaps would probably not do well.

The other thing is consignment. There’s a little industry of kid consignment sales where you can basically sell great condition kid clothes for 60-80% of retail, and get decent prices for toys, etc. Similar events exist for other categories too.

I've been getting good results on Craigslist, which can now search a radius of 250 miles and also 3rd party sites allow national searches. I was afraid that FB would gut it, but it now seems like FB actually just skimmed the less serious posters.

For industrial stuff, there seems to be multitudes of used equipment sites, but no dominant one, so it's just a big scavenger hunt. There's a few attempts at sites aggregating listings, but they're all lame, IMO.

I think it really depends on your location. Craigslist is super hot in Dallas.

Nextdoor is a good alternative but highly location dependent.

Craigslist though i prefer fb marketplace. Not sure why.

Recommend putting a note in every Craigslist post like "No verification code scams". Because if your phone number is included scammers will eagerly text asking for Google Voice verification code, claiming they need it to prove you're legit. Yet they'll actually use it to open a GV account and possibly take over your phone number.

Craigslist. It's simple and better. Last time I tried Facebook, they immediately started up selling me on advertising.

I stopped using it when I realised all the stuff im along was being put on my feed to friends. Did they change this?

I have found recently Facebook Marketplace has had a much larger selection compared to craigslist.

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