Facebook announces 'Marketplace' enabling you to buy or sell with local community

Facebook has announced the launch of “Marketplace”, an online extension of social network experience wherein people can connect with each other to discover, buy and sell items. This provides a more streamlined approach for people to quickly list the products that they want to sell or are interested in buying. [caption id=“attachment_338802” align=“aligncenter” width=“640”]  Image Credit: Facebook[/caption] The discover suggestions are focused on the community while taking into account the distance to the seller. The service is currently limited to Android and iOS users over 18-years-old of age in USA, UK, Australia and New Zealand. The company has announced a gradual rollout of the service to additional countries as announced on the Facebook Newsroom post.

Marketplace offers an intuitive design to make posting items for sale easier. To add an item to market for sale, you just have to click or upload the image of the item, add product name, description and price including the location and category of the listing. The company is currently working on the desktop version of the Facebook website, and it will arrive in coming months. [caption id=“attachment_338801” align=“aligncenter” width=“640”]  Image Credit: Facebook[/caption]

The overall experience is better than the current commerce facilities provided on the Facebook Groups. To start, the user just needs to tap on the “shop” icon at the bottom of the main Facebook and start exploring. In the top portion of the app, visitors are greeted by four options, “Sell,” “Categories,” “Search,” and, “Your items”. Marketplace allows you to post and filter devices using location, category and price points. The built-in location tool can help you adjust the region of your search results or change the city altogether.

After tapping the image of the product, the section gives you more details from the seller, product description, name and the profile pictures of the seller. Sellers can directly send a message to the Facebook chat inbox to ask about additional details and payment modes.  

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