Facebook on Monday announced Marketplace, a new mobile app that facilitates buying and selling between peers.
Marketplace allows members of a community to discover, buy and sell items, noted Facebook Product Management Director Mary Ku.
The service is scheduled for rollout this week in the United States, UK, Australia and New Zealand. Users can access Marketplace by tapping a shopping icon at the bottom of the Facebook mobile app.
The opening screen displays photos of items for sale by people who live in a user-defined geographic area. Tapping an image will reveal more details about the item: product description, name and profile picture of seller, and location. Items can be saved for later reference.
If you're interested in an item, you can let a seller know by sending a direct message via Marketplace. After that, you're on your own. Facebook does not facilitate payment or delivery of Marketplace purchases.
A slick user interface makes it easy to post items for sale on Marketplace.
You take a photo of what you're selling or import an image of it from your camera roll. Add a product name, description and price. Confirm your location, pick a category for the item, and post to Marketplace.
As you post to Marketplace, you can choose to have your item posted simultaneously to a buy and sell group on Facebook.
The addition of Marketplace is part of Facebook's larger marketing strategy.
"Facebook is trying to cover as much of the digital ecosystem with marketing as they can," said Michael Inouye, a principal analyst at ABI Research.
"The more people that use their service, the greater the opportunity to get eyes, which gives them ad revenues," he told the E-Commerce Times.
"While businesses can't target individual shoppers with offers based on their Marketplace behavior, Facebook can still likely find ways to use that information to enhance its services, both to users and to its advertisers, Caporaso said.
Courtesy of EcommerceTimes
