Facebook has launched another new product with the name Marketplace that let user’s list items for sale. According to Facebook, it already has 450 million people who are currently selling and buying through various informal groups on its network. Facebook Marketplace acts as a modest step into the classified advertising market that is recently fought over by Craiglist, eBay and more nascent start-ups like OfferUp and LetGo. With the Facebook, Marketplace users can list their items for sale and can also search the area around them for the things they want. Facebook is planning to use its huge audience of 1.71 billion monthly users for upending the local sales market completely. The world of selling and buying of products and services on Facebook through informal groups is hard to get but it will act as a very beneficial market for Facebook as a huge number of people are involved in this system. So Facebook is surely going to enter into heavily crowded and well-established Marketplace. The largest operator of the classified ad space is eBay as it sold more than $20bn of merchandise every day but most of this sale is from big sellers than the individuals.
Facebook is now taking on Craiglist, which is a classified ads site. Facebook can get the huge advantage over its competitors because it has very vast audience and a significant amount of resources too. Facebook Marketplace can act as a convenient place to buy and sell products and services for the people in the same community. Facebook is now posing a substantial threat to the eBay and Craigslist as these are the two dominant players in the world of online commerce. Facebook reported that its Marketplace will roll out in the market in few days in the four big countries United States, Australia, United Kingdom and New Zealand. The marketplace will be available as the desktop version of the Facebook and will be soon available in many other countries too. Marketplace will enable sellers to post the items of their products with just a few steps and buyers can search for the local community for the product they want. Buyers can send a direct message to the sellers to buy the products. Facebook Marketplace is expected to operate like eBay and Craiglist like both offers some safeguards for users. This is not the first attempt of Facebook for peer-to-peer shopping as Marketplace was launched in 2007 by Facebook but it failed to impress the audience.