Facebook Marketplace is keeping young people on the platform | Hacker News Reader

Facebook Marketplace is keeping young people on the platform

cnbc.com

52 pointsowendarko61 comments

My FB account exists almost solely for marketplace, which has almost total market dominance for local classifieds where I live in Australia. Recently they’ve stopped letting you send messages to sellers via the website on your phone and insist that you use the app instead. It’s probably one of the few hooks they have left to try and get people on to the platform.

It's frustrating. They have completely stomped every other marketplace in the UK. Things like Gumtree are ghost-towns in comparison.

I don't use it but my wife has sold loads of stuff that we no longer need. In that sense it's fantastic, it's made local selling very easy, but I really wish it was almost anyone but FB.

I think you can work around that messaging restriction by requesting desktop site from the mobile browser. Not saying it is not irritating, though.

Or beeper - its fully replaced messager on my phone with no issues from Facebook marketplace

100%. I refuse to have an account, which means I need to use my partners to access marketplace, and a few landcruiser groups (which is mostly buying and selling parts, or advice)

It pains me that car forums and classifieds have succumbed to Facebook. I have no other need for Facebook, but on those fronts, Facebook is king.

IH8MUD is really the king for advice. But for 2nd hand parts, or 2nd hand vehicles, in Australia, it’s Facebook groups.

I suspect this is quite popular behaviour, as I recently saw that groups can enable anonymous posts (obviously still need an account). Which I prefer to catfishing people who are genuinely helping out, and who I feel a sense of community with. I just refuse to consent to Facebook being part of that relationship.

if you use chrome/firefox you can still “request desktop site” and get messenger working without the app.

I hate FB and Meta properties so much. and they have captured so much of the web. every little thing - requires login. if you don't have an account - you can't see shit.

I have accepted that i'm one of those now left behind. Books & internet forums is where I will catch up. even if I miss out, am I really missing out.

I'm from Austria and until recently I didn't even know that FB Marketplace was a thing. Never used it in my life. We have a great local website (https://willhaben.at) that everyone uses. I guess it's the Austrian version of Craigslist.

Same in Switzerland. Happy to have Tutti and similar sites. No need for a walled garden market place.

Lots of countries have settled on a local marketplace before FB arrived. E.g. in New Zealand, https://www.trademe.co.nz/ is too big to be displaced.

First mover advantage, nimbleness, and filters appropriate to regional differences (e.g. in Switzerland, translating easily between the different langages and filtering by canton) make such website stay ahead of the FB juggernaut.

There is certainly a lot to be said for first-mover advantage, but TradeMe specifically (while still popular) is currently fighting a losing battle. Between rising listing fees, selling fees as a percentage of the product's value, and the influx of drop-shippers that flood categories with "local" products, its days are likely numbered. Personally, while 10 years ago everyone I knew was using it, I no longer know anybody that goes to TradeMe to sell everyday items. I'm not a fan of FB, but the fact that it's monetarily free to use makes all the difference for the average user.

Same in Finland, we have a few local options (one of which was bought by a massive Nordic conglomerate) that were established well before FB Marketplace became a thing.

One of them even has an escrow system where the money stays in escrow until the delivery is confirmed as being correct, the money will also be released if the recipient never fetches the parcel.

FB Marketplace is just scams wall to wall, reporting does nothing. The only way to do business in via FBM is face to face and verify the item.

Usually local FB for sale groups are better quality and actually moderated, which marketplace isn't.

In Germany we have Kleinanzeigen. It dominates this market.

Until recently, Kleinanzeigen belonged to eBay. That may have contributed to its popularity.

Thousands of engineers grinding leetcode so they can work on a Craigslist clone.

Whatever pays the bills you know..

Ultimately its just spaffing adverts at Plebs, no different to anywhere else Leetcoders end up.

Great compensation though!

A clone of a site with about 40 employees and something like 200m MAU.

I thought FB marketplace had peaked already, especially for furniture.

18 months ago you could find stuff on there fairly easily, now it's full of "must go" or "Free" items that are "message me for pricelist" when you click through. It ends up being a real slog to find anything.

Yeah the "free" stuff makes finding some items a bit annoying (e.g. sofas), and if you try to sell any Apple products you get inundated with scammers, but it's still fairly useful.

Craigslist was like this too back when I used it. I never understood why they didn't ban the users who were doing it as it made certain categories too difficult to bother browsing.

> A key advantage is trust; users' Facebook profiles make transactions feel safer than on anonymous platforms like Craigslist, according to Seock.

Early on, I suspect that Craigslist attracted a lot of sketchiness with all the free stuff, anonymous sexual hookups personals ads, and prostitution.

I wonder whether they could've survived as just a non-sketchy classified ads place for household items and roommates/apartments. Which, at the time (at least in Boston) managed to coexist with the sketchy side of the site.

Lately, selling household items and computer gear onto Craigslist seems to come down to the rare random event that anyone is looking at it.

I live in the city, within walking distance of multiple universities, but, if an item is worth shipping, it'll now sell on eBay, but sit unsold for months on Craigslist.

I also now put on the curb things that in the past I would've been able to sell easily on Craigslist.

I suspect that the local used item sales have moved to Facebook Marketplace, plus students just buying new things delivered from an app (Amazon? Target?), when in the past they would've shopped new more.

I've managed to be free of Facebook all these years, and I don't want to start now.

From TFA...

> Facebook’s influence remains strong globally, but younger users are logging in less.

Not here in south east Asia where FB remains dominant. Indeed having any kind of social life without a FB account would be difficult.

To me the reason people use FB market is because of the lack of friction. you already have an account and probably already have the app. just snap a picture tell it what it is and how much and you're done. don't have to sign up for anything, or wait for confirmation emails. (I think this also tends to be the case for their dating services)

They also from what I can see do more aggressive searching on the content of images. I was once looking for a slot machine. and it found me a listing that did not mention a slot machine in the title or description (I think they were both blank somehow actually) but there was one in the picture.

It also does a lot more suggesting than craigslist or ebay for example. Not just reminding you of things you already saw. but thats FB being able to scrape all your data and know everything you want of course.

>Unlike eBay or Etsy, Marketplace doesn’t charge listing fees

>While Facebook doesn’t charge listing fees

>Marketplace isn’t a major direct revenue source

>It’s one of the least monetized parts of Facebook

Yet.

Genuine q, what makes FB marketplace good, and how did it blow up over Ebay / Craigslist? Is it a combination of having the platform with the most people as well as being the most likely platform to have people who are situated near you?

eBay charges taxes and takes a cut of the sale price. They report your income to the IRS too. Facebook marketplace allows people to meet up and exchange things for cash. No fees. No taxes. And it’s much harder to scam someone in person.

Seemingly, craigslist should allow for this as well. Unfortunately for craigslist, however, it has been societally labeled as “for the olds”

Craigslist also became a cesspool of wasted time.

"No, I'm not going to accept 1% of what I listed. I'm going to put it in the garbage instead since my time is now worth more. In fact, I've now had enough of you assholes call and lowball me that I'm now net negative even at what I listed so into the trash it goes."

Presumably, Facebook Marketplace simply hasn't gone through the degradation cycle, yet.

The Facebook marketplace scam is two fold: On the buyer side: Facebook does allow shipping and they have none of the (admittedly poor) seller protections that eBay has, so buyers will use hacked cashapp/venmo/paypal accounts, to “buy” something only for the money to be clawed back a few days later once the item has already shipped. On the seller side you have sellers that charge a deposit upfront to “reserve” the item but then ghost you, and bec the transaction is happening outside of Facebook the buyer has no recourse, you can try to get facebook to delete the account but it’s super easy to create a new one. As long as people are aware of these scams and just ignore them they can have a fairly good experience. Though I have found fbm buyers try to negotiate a lot more no matter how cheap you make the item. You’re honestly better off setting a high price and letting ppl try to negotiate you down to what you’re comfortable selling at bec everyone wants a “deal”. This means that there needs to be room for that in the price. So some things just are hard to sell if the new cost is fairly low already.

The sheer amount of inbound I get for random stuff is overwhelming.

Facebook can put stuff in front of so many people.

I have sold furniture, electronics, used clothing, all sorts of crap.

I wouldn't describe it as "good", but this is where the sellers/buyers are, especially for home/kids items. It's like the demographics of normie moms being on Facebook is what gives market lots of views - items can then land on people's feeds as well, through the local buy/sell groups.

What I preferred recently when buying a used car over Craigslist was that I was able to vet the seller more easily because this was their Facebook profile. Like many other people on the older side, their profile was completely public, and I was able to scroll through over a decade of pictures, education, family etc. This was a very useful check against scams and lies.

People can share their market place listing with their social circle. That includes specialized groups, but also friends.

I recently sold a 35 year old camper van, with one click I shared it in a group for old cars. People who saw it in turn shared that again in other groups for cars.

Users see those listings in their feed, on the same page where they might see news or funny dog videos.

If I sell on my local version of Craigslist, only people who actively search for a camper van would see it.

In some countries, eBay or craigslist was never a thing. In NZ we have our local version of eBay but the success fees have gotten so ridiculously high that FB marketplace is slowly becoming the only option.

I came here to say this. TradeMe, New Zealand’s homegrown eBay, charges ridiculous amounts to sell items. And essentially zero customer service.

They have cornered the market in auto and housing (including rentals) but are losing out on general goods. I know a lot of people who don’t even bother looking at TradeMe anymore to buy, let alone sell.

I can’t remember when I last logged into my TradeMe account.

In Poland Allegro takes the most dominant role. It started as a simple auctions site 26 years ago and now it's a big e-commerce platform with additional classifieds, price comparison engine and consumer credit, tickets marketplace services. In last years they enter Czechia, Slovakia, Hungary - mostly by acquisition of existing sites and services. The last attempt of slice out what Allegro managed to grab by the largest IT company have failed. Comarch which exists since '93 and has branches in 32 countries couldn't withstand Allegro dominance at home and their wszystko.pl service closed after only 7 months.

So amazon is not that much popular here - the force of habit for buying on Allegro works against Bezos' company. They enter too late, offered not much at the start and often products descriptions were poorly machine translated. There was even a picture that ran for a while around our part of the Internet where some Nigerian economy book title due to this translation mishap become really offensive.

In the UK Craigslist was never really a thing. eBay is too complex for many of the things people sell.

My wife sells a lot of our old stuff on marketplace. It's quick and simple to do, and there is a huge market. It's all small stuff that no one will pay shipping for, but if you are local and can pop round it's absolutely fine. Things like kids toys, books, mostly low value stuff. We've got rid of knackered old furniture for free on there because it meant someone else would take it away.

It has the advantage of market size. A lot of people are still on FB for things other than marketplace, so it's an obvious place to look when you want to buy something second hand. It's also easy to share your listings on FB.

I would be shocked if the modal listing price on FBM UK is not £0.00

Gumtree is basically the British Craigslist.

And yet it is so underdeveloped. I'm in a few second hand board groups where every listing is like 20 different games at different prices. They have to put a price, so some people put 0, some put $30 and some put $999,999.

I hate buying stuff on marketplace, it's so feature poor.

That sounds like the seller doing stupid things though. Beyond some text parsing and suggesting splitting the listings, what can marketplace do here? (or allowing to report incorrect listing)

"the seller doing stupid things"?

Every single person selling second hand board games is in this position. No one is setting up a single listing for each game. And this is hardly unique to board games.

>what can marketplace do here?

Obviously, allow an option to indicate that a listing consists of different items with different prices, and to specify a range. "40 second hand games, $30-80", it's not complicated.

I've just seen a post like that and... interacting with multiple people about different items on the same market entry would be in top 10 worst experiences of my life. I really find it weird not to post them separately.

Seems to work just fine. Typically they post a photo of the whole collection, and a text list of the items and prices, which they update as things sell. They're usually wanting to sell more than one game to each buyer, so it's much easier to coordinate in a single listing.

I thought people use sites like Craigslist for local sales. At least in my country most people use a local website, they use Facebook Marketplace a lot less.

It's extremely region dependent. Some areas have fb marketplace, some custom services.

Whatever you do, definitely don't try looking for drugs or escorts on FB Marketplace. :)

> Marketplace isn’t a major direct revenue source, but it keeps users engaged.

> “It’s one of the least monetized parts of Facebook,” said Enberg. “But it brings in engagement, which advertisers value.”

> Meta relies on ads for over 97% of its $164.5 billion revenue in 2024.

Facebook's spin in the article was delusional as expected for a big tech business, but I'm surprised they let this little nugget of truth slip out, and somehow managed to not learn anything from the fact that a huge demographic engages _more_ with the part of the site that gets the least monetization focus.

I hate that Facebook has taken so much of craigslist's market. I can't stand Facebook but as a seller or a buyer you have to go where the network is. Marketplace is still in the outcompete stage so it feels friendly and convenient but eventually when they kill craigslist they'll start turning the enshitification knobs back up.

If everybody would think that way we would end up in walled gardens without any alternatives. Wait that's exactly what happened in many countries?

i always find it funny how ppl shit on facebook as if any other social media site was orders of magnitude better. facebook is as shitty as you make it to be. follow shit reel creators and it will be shit. get into shit awful groups and it will be shit.

Follow all your friends and family and the algorithm will decide that you don't actually want to see their recent posts

go to the feeds tab, it's all there

I registered a new Facebook account solely to set up my Oculus Quest. It laid dormant for 3 years until I needed to log into it again to add my friend on Messenger. My default home feed without ever having interacted was full of horrible AI generated "Today is my birthday" images, Jesus Christ with cabin crew, etc. I didn't make it like that, this is what Facebook decided would be good to show

Reply on news.ycombinator.com