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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
>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.
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.
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.
Facebook can put stuff in front of so many people.
I have sold furniture, electronics, used clothing, all sorts of crap.
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.
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.
Seemingly, craigslist should allow for this as well. Unfortunately for craigslist, however, it has been societally labeled as “for the olds”
"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.
I hate buying stuff on marketplace, it's so feature poor.
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.
- Sell an AI agent that sells and markets the item for the user on the marketplace, and manages the sale.
- Then have people sell their fucking houses on it.
- Tell Zuckerberg what you have achieved
- Have Zuckerberg express to Rogan on the show who will then express it to Elon on another show
- Watch Elon buy Zillow
- Live a life of riches, while Elon juggles Twitter, Zillow and the bankrupt car company.
There.
Listings used to say stuff like "iPhone 15 Pro, good condition, comes with case and cable, no box, one scratch on rear shown in pics"
They now say "Introducing the brand new Apple iPhone 15 Pro 5G in Black Titanium! This device features a Hexa Core processor and Apple A17 Pro chipset model, providing lightning fast performance <continues blather>"
I got a better result on OLX, though it remains unsold.
Speaking of which anyone near or around Indiranagar, Bangalore who is looking for a dirt cheap 21 speed MTB... please DM :)
> “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.
