FACEBOOK MARKETPLACE: WHAT IT IS AND HOW IT WORKS
A few days ago Facebook has released throughout Europe, including Italy, a new and important feature, intended to give a shock to the ecommerce market and the sale of online products: the Facebook Marketplace.
What is
Mary Ku, head of the Project Management of Facebook, has explained very well the reason that pushed Facebook to create the Marketplace:
«Marketplace was born because over 450 million people visit Facebook's sales groups every month, and the social network wanted to make exchanges simpler and more effective. With the introduction of Marketplace, the goal of Facebook is to provide members with a dedicated place where they can carry out these trades ».
In short, the Marketplace is a platform where you can sell and buy products of all kinds: from mobile phones to garments, from garden tools to real estate; the only products that can not be sold on the platform are drugs, weapons, alcohol, animals and, in general, illegal items.
It is important to note that the purchase of products does not take place through a payment made within Facebook: the user interested in a product will contact the seller through a private message and will agree directly with him to manage the purchase; moreover Facebook will have no sales gain.
How it works
To access the Facebook Marketplace, just click on the icon that appears at the top left in the desktop version, or on the icon in the middle of the white bar for the mobile version (as long as you have recently updated it ).
As soon as you enter we can immediately browse the list of products on sale filtered according to our position and through a sophisticated algorithm that takes into account our likes and our behavior on the Marketplace itself: once identified the product of our interest just send a message to the seller to agree on the payment.
The procedure for selling an item is quite simple: just click on the button at the top right "Sell something" and fill the fields with all the information about the product we want to sell (for the app the procedure is slightly different), and in a few seconds the product will be available on the Marketplace.
Possible future developments
For its characteristics and also because of the fact that it is addressed only to private users (but in the future this aspect could change), the Facebook Marketplace is in direct competition with buying and selling sites such as Subito.it, towards of which, however, has a great advantage: a huge user basin that daily uses the social and that now can buy and sell items comfortably without moving from the platform.
Also I would not be surprised to find that the long-term goal of Mark Zuckerberg is to introduce payments within the same platform, and in this case I believe that even the giants Amazon and Ebay will not be able to sleep peacefully.
In this regard, it should be noted that Facebook is conducting tests to introduce the search results of products from Ebay ( click to read the original article ), and it is possible that this example can open the way to other future illustrious collaborations.