Are You Selling Your Stuff Through Facebook Marketplace?

Buying and selling amongst friends and family has been one unofficial use of Facebook for several years now, with local community groups solely dedicated to flogging unwanted items. However, the Marketplace feature recently incorporated into the social sharing site aims to make the practice a whole lot easier.

​2016 has already seen social media giant Instagram conveniently imitate the already popular Snapchat Stories, and now its owner, Facebook, seems to have jumped on the bandwagon by adding a tried-and-tested feature. Trading platforms such as eBay and Preloved should be worried, as Facebook has made online car boot sales a whole lot easier via full integration into their popular app. This will see the demise of countless emails and forum-style discussions between buyers and traders, instead allowing individuals to barter prices, discuss swaps and organise collections via a message thread.

With the click of a button, a digital bazaar of secondhand objects appears at your fingertips, following a similar format used by other selling apps like Shpock and Gumtree. You can find products within a 100km radius, as well as search for specific items, browse categories, and of course sell your own bric-a-brac. With Facebook Marketplace nestled between your friend requests and notifications icons, it will be interesting to see the world of online trading develop, not to mention the response from pre-existing buy-and-sell sites.

Do you sell via the interweb? We’d love to know how, so get involved in the conversation by commenting below. (Please don’t advertise your used kitchen utensils though, we already have a full set. Thanks anyway.)