My wife has been buying and selling things on individual Facebook groups for years before this official marketplace.
Selling on Facebook is hands down a vastly better experience than selling things on Craigslist in every way - especially if you live in a market that is too small for a designated Craigslist area.
Our real world experience:
1) Hyperlocal - Our city of 40k-50k is 40 miles from the nearest Craigslist area (OKC). Facebook groups and now the marketplace ensures we don't have to drive 30 minutes or more to meet someone. Most people buy things that are either very close to them (i.e. already in the same city), or are more willing to drive to where you are.
2) Related to (1) - Since it is more local (we usually meet at a Walgreens or supermarket parking lot that is only a few blocks away), we can easily sell more items that are lower in value (like kids clothing, etc.). This is something that just isn't worth the hassle on Craigslist.
3) Way fewer scammers and spammers since you have to use your real name.
4) You know who you are meeting and what they look like (again - real name, single account requirement).
5) Built-in messaging allows you an easier way to communicate meeting details privately without having to give your phone number or email address.
6) You can easily block and report people who are problematic and they will never see your posts or be able to buy your stuff or message you again.
In short, Facebook has allowed us to sell a lot of things on a much more regular basis than Craigslist ever would, with much less hassle and spam/scammers.
4) You know who you are meeting and what they look like (again - real name, single account requirement).
5) Built-in messaging
This also means someone can harrass the crap out of you for whatever reason they want regarding the item.
I think the surface area of a world where transactions are 100% anonymous is quite small.
Ending harassment on Facebook is as easy as blocking them. Done.
Your notion of "private" is a little strange. Facebook offers the illusion of private transactions by effectively robbing everyone of their privacy - in other words, that is how they established themselves as the pre-eminent and now possibly only two sided marketplace for the "common folks". This is like thanking the local thugs for keeping peace in the streets so that people can go about their local commerce in a peaceful way.
Contrast this to all the other things we actually consider private: face to face meetings, phone conversations (ok, not so much anymore), sending physical letters (again...), etc. where there is, or used to be, a somewhat reasonable expectation that the conduit facilitating your private interaction was not gathering all that information to be packaged off to the highest bidder.
Also, just wait until one day your customer realizes he/she is being targeted with ads based on stuff they bought from you and from someone else, which when combined exposes them in some way they would rather not have been. You just might wish you were merely dealing with the "spammers and scammers" instead, in which case there is usually at least the possibility of recourse.
Yes, all my criticisms can be directed at internet commerce in general. It is only FB which has had a history of leaving a lot of things unsaid in a way which makes their users feel like idiots once people realize exactly why those things were left unsaid. For e.g., I bet no one actually asked FB if they are going to show ads on WhatsApp, instead choosing to believe and then applaud the WhatsApp founders for their stance on ads. On hindsight, people are now realizing that MZ never actually gave a shit what the WhatsApp founder said or did, and was only too happy to let everyone make complete fools of themselves.
I can pull out a story here which would tell people exactly what MZ thinks of his users in general, but unfortunately I am starting to now think that MZ was spot-on with his assessment.
I think the OP does a good job of outlining why this is preferable to Craigslist for your run of the mill buying and selling, namely that buying from a known entity is generally preferable than buying from an unknown one.
Facebook makes a set of tradeoffs regarding privacy and monetization, and they seem to be very popular. You assign a lot of agency to Facebook for orchestrating all of this, when really they are just providing to what the market wants: a free (as in beer) social network.
/counter-rant
They added a tab to the facebook app that you can't remove. It's inconveniently placed between two tabs that most people do care about (newsfeed and notifications). Furthermore, I randomly get a red number over the marketplace, similar to the number shown for notifications. This is very frustrating to me and it never seems to go away. I've mistaken this little notification bubble for a legitimate notification multiple times, when it was actually just a new post in the marketplace that I don't care about.
The 'newsfeed' of marketplace is littered with complete crap. 50+% of it is fake shoes, fake purses, used womens clothing, and people looking to trade their piece of garbage cars for another one (sorry, I don't want to trade for your civic that is worth <1k)
Selling something was a pretty poor experience for me. I got a ton of messages from people who had no interest in what I was selling, and instead spammed me like crazy with stuff I didn't care about at all. For me this was more excusable on a platform like craigslist because it is easy enough to filter email, but there is no real way to filter FB messages. Now I have personal messages and spammers mixed together.
Overall I'm happy to see this become a thing, but IMO execution has been poor. Well, annoying at the least, but I assume that is their goal. Much better than the terrible interface of the buy/sell groups, especially with how broken Facebooks group search is (I often can't find posts that were posted within the past month or so in a group. I'm searching correct terms, they just aren't indexed.)
I am part of a bunch of secondary beer market groups (raffles and straight up sales) on Facebook, and it's a pretty terrible platform, but it has the user base :(
Search Groups in the "Buy & Sell" category and you will see what I mean: https://www.facebook.com/groups/?discover_category_id=477274...
The social proof that FB allow for, make it possible to sell to people you don't know much more securely.
It was one of those things that the community itself developed and FB just turned it into a service.
I was considering getting into this space a few years back but realized that FB would eventually catch up.
Still is room for non-fb competitors but their social proof card is hard to beat IMO.
I'll try out FB's new feature, but ND sets the bar pretty high.
Why do these sites keep making privacy settings open to all by default?
Also note that you can post to just your neighborhood, or to yours and a few close by. You don't have to share with all (and frequently, I don't).
Plus the fact that I know the people on it are geographically close get rid of the flake factor for me.
Nextdoor is far better positioned to avoid this kind of spammy experience. They require real names and verify addresses so you know the people you are interacting with are real, and actually live near you.
I'm prototyping an idea for a locally moderated community bulletin board at townsourced.com.
The idea is to try to mesh the strong moderation you get with sites like Reddit with a marketplace for buying and selling (among other things).
It's funny how many people would email this: "Interested, pls txt 555-5555"
I ended up switching to Close5 and had a lot more luck with that - even near the end where I was just giving stuff away. For some reason people on craigslist were still way too picky about free stuff, one guy even asking if I would pay for it to be delivered.
With all of these services, I've found the biggest problem to be with people not knowing how to read. If you say firm price and pick up only, they'll still try to get you to deliver and go down in price.
Personally, I don't use it. Facebook provides no protection for either buyer or seller, which is something that Ebay (or Trademe [0] in the case of NZ) offer. I'm constantly seeing people on the local buy/sell/exchange groups complaining about buying stolen phones, or people failing to send items, or various other things.
It's not difficult to make a fake account. Although it does say how long the person has been a Facebook member on the listings.
I just looked on my phone, and the first thing I see for sale is synthetic marijuana. This doesn't bode well.
The user experience is pretty poor too. For a test, I wanted to see if I could find a couch. The closest I could filter to was Furniture. I then searched for Couch, which then removed the filter, so I added the filter back on. Instead of seeing a bunch of couches, half the things for sale were tables and beds.
I'm not a fan of the image-only listings either. I'd prefer to see a title with an image when searching. A price would be useful too. Instead I get a bunch of crappy cellphone pictures of peoples old shit.
Then there's the issue for me that you aren't allowed to buy and sell firearms through Facebook, despite the fact that it's perfectly legal in New Zealand, and Trademe allows you to do it.
I can say that I will stick to using Trademe.
Also a lot of these people can be vouched for since someone tends to have dealt with each other at some point.
I've only made a couple of trades through it so far, but it seems to work well.
When it comes to sales, craigslist is useful because it allows you to remain anonymous. With FB, I seem to be exposing exactly who I am, where I live, what I have for sale. In places with high crime rates, this opens me up to becoming a victim, as perps can search this information, see my name (maybe search online for more details), etc. Craigslist has even worked with police departments to set up safe areas[0] for people to exchange items. Will FB prioritize these important aspects?
I just recently saw an advertisement for their rural internet initiative, launching 3kW large-wingspan aircraft over remote areas to transmit network signals[1]. On the surface it is a useful goal - to connect more people - but ultimately, FB wants to increase its membership, and enrich its supply of data collected by people. Do we really prioritize having people send likes on FB from their shantytowns[2] instead of helping them improve their own villages -- food, sanity[3], customs, etc.?
From [2]:
> Mr. Kohli, 17, said he spends about four hours a day on the Internet and uses an Express Wi-Fi plan to supplement his Airtel data plan.
> Facebook has no desire to enter directly into the Internet service business.
> An important cog in the system is the merchant in each village that sells the service. Facebook and AirJaldi decided that there should be just one authorized seller per village to give that person a strong incentive to sell as many subscriptions as possible.
[0] http://www.npr.org/2015/03/27/395586863/police-departments-o...
[1] http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-08-31/facebook-t...
[2] http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/10/25/facebook-strives-to...
[3] http://www.ted.com/talks/joe_madiath_better_toilets_better_l...
Is this useful to police, when profiles can be forged?
Personally, when I sell something I don't want people to learn who I am. I'd rather just sell it and remain anonymous. There is more concern about the legality of a good from the buyer's perspective, not the seller.
Similar to that Vernor Vinge story about true names.
Who is "we"? There are many paths to "doing good". Of course FB will pick something that is mutually beneficial to the people and the company.
I wonder what effect the marketplace will have on black market biryani.
[1]: https://medium.com/@monteiro/this-article-first-appeared-in-...
Using a person to purchase firearms for a person who can't get them is called a straw purchase.
Maybe advertising something other than a gun to sell a gun should be covered under straw purchase.
They shut down the NZ Hunting Facebook group, which had over 10,000 members because people were selling firearms on it (which is not in violation of New Zealand law).
Working towards requiring registration/background checks of private sales would actually accomplish what they want. Lobbying Facebook to disassociate themselves from the sales will accomplish little more than moving the sales off of Facebook.
And of course, given that there are tens of millions of unregistered firearms in the US, all a registration law would do is inconvenience people willing to comply with it, it wouldn't stop people looking to get a gun without registering it.
There is no reason a buyer shouldn't be able to go to the ATF website submit themselves for a BC and get an approval code for a seller to verify. That respects privacy and gets you closer to 100% background checks. No responsible gun owner wants to sell to a felon. Thats why a lot will only do private transactions with CCW permit holders.
Unless FB weeds out the spammers and the harassing, this is just another way to make quick bucks for FB.
Usually, when a software evolve trying to do everything, at the end it does do nothing well. Let's see what'll happen here.
looks pretty much the same, fb is blue-ish, shpock green-ish. Comparison pic: https://scontent-vie1-1.xx.fbcdn.net/t31.0-8/14524544_101547...
Bizarre.
It sounds a lot like that, only tied to facebook, which makes it worse.
I can understand why Chinese apps did what they did, because of the isolation from the international services and being more accessible via mobile devices to the majority. But Facebook is an attack on the Internet.
#fuckfacebook
