Facebook have just announced that they are launching their own buy and sell service called Marketplace. They found that 450million people were part of buying and selling groups on Facebook. So in response to this, they have now created an official and more secure platform for people to buy and sell.
The app allows you to see what items are listed near you by using your built-in location. If you don’t want to search in your location, you will also be able to adjust your search location.
Other than that, it seems that there aren’t many other features that are any different to competing brands, but Facebook have such a huge following already, that they are likely to be successful anyway.
Marketplace will be competing against brands such as eBay and Craigslist, which are already highly established and successful. These two brands are just the major ones, over the past couple of years there have been many more similar brands popping up. Apps such as Depop, Shpock and Gumtree, all offer a similar service to Facebook’s Marketplace.
Facebook’s Marketplace will be launching on the Facebook App over the next few days in the US, UK, Australia and New Zealand. They also have plans for it to launch on Desktop and for other countries in the coming months, but no dates have been set as of yet.