How Do I Download Facebook Marketplace
Lorraine Karmazyn
Facebook leverages the Marketplace through its social network. Facebook users often already have an account and there is no need to download another app. Users can quickly get set up to buy or sell from their existing accounts. This capacity makes it easy for people to quickly check what is available on the Marketplace and make easy purchases. It may also tempt other marketplaces to tap into a large new avenue, possibly drawing in new users who have previously avoided Facebook. For sellers, a vast audience of 2.2 billion users and the ease for users to browse while already on Facebook are big draws.
I recently learned that Facebook Marketplace is the world\u2019s second-largest marketplace, in terms of monthly active users, behind only Amazon. It\u2019s ahead of Alibaba, Walmart, eBay, Taobao, and has quietly left the once-unconquerable Craigslist in the dust. For years, I\u2019ve been curious to learn what it took to make Facebook Marketplace work, when so many local marketplaces (including Facebook\u2019s previous attempts) have failed. There is no better human alive to tell this story than Deb Liu, and below, for the first time, Deb shares the story behind Facebook Marketplace.
At the time, commerce in groups was informal and completely organic. One of the biggest issues early on was that there was no way to know what groups were meant for selling things (vs. being purely social). We decided to set up a way to allow group admins to opt into becoming classified commerce groups. This allowed us to track organic behaviors on the platform. We found that many more people were part of Facebook Groups communities that had been set up specifically for buying, selling, and trading than we expected. Some were local mini-marketplaces (ex: Denton Buy and Sale), some were interest groups (ex: marble collectors trading), and some were both (ex: classic car sale groups). Some of our earliest experiments were simply structuring the groups so that items for sale showed up as listings rather than just discussion posts. We also started to rank the group content to help people discover products for sale. Prior to this, no group content was ranked\u2014it was purely chronological.
We eventually ran into a problem. Being stuck within the Groups system was constraining, and most users had trouble discovering groups, joining them, and finding items. This meant that we faced the twin marketplace issues of limited seller liquidity and difficult buyer discovery. Buyers told us in research studies that they couldn\u2019t find the items they wanted, and sellers felt that their reach was limited. We knew we had to think bigger.
Almost every two-sided marketplace struggles with bringing on enough supply and/or bringing on enough demand. Surprisingly, Facebook didn\u2019t. We already had both buyers and sellers, but we weren\u2019t succeeding in making the connection between the two. As long as we stayed within Groups, we could not address this issue. We had two options:
Once we had the tab within the Facebook app to drive buyer engagement, we settled on the key metric of weekly buyer retention. Our early bet was that supply would drive demand\u2014that having sufficient inventory would get buyers excited about coming to this new tab to browse. To do that, we had to get sellers on board. Sellers had no incentive to create new listings on an unknown marketplace with no clear buyer engagement. That led us to make it a \u201Cone-checkbox experience,\u201D which allowed sellers to take items that were already being listed in groups and cross-post them into the Marketplace Tab as a way to seed the early supply.
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