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Comment by Freedom2 | Hacker News Reader

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?

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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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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