Facebook opens up its Craigslist-like section to retailers
Facebook is trying to figure out what people want from Marketplace, so it’s going to add a bunch of new products from real vendors in order to suss that out. “We’ll kind of look and see what’s popular, what people want to engage with,” Deb Liu, Facebook’s head of Marketplace, told Recode, “So if people are searching or looking for something, we want to make that available to them.”
Some new items that will be available through Marketplace are cars from local dealerships, real estate listings, ticket sales and products from professional retailers. Facebook already hosts ticket sale and shopping pages, but now these will be under the Marketplace umbrella. Once the company gets a better idea of what Facebook users are looking for, it will boost those sorts of offerings.
Facebook launched Marketplace last year as move on eBay and Craigslist and tweaked the forum in May to make it easier to find and post items with expanded and easier to sort through categories. Marketplace was also expanded to over a dozen additional countries earlier this month.
While product offerings will be expanded, Facebook is still staying away from managing payments. “Eventually, we could go in a number of different directions [with payments],” Liu told Recode. “But right now we’re really trying to figure out, ‘how do you actually drive engagement between people and businesses, people and other people locally?’ That’s how we really think about the product.”
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