Facebook was trying to scrub everyone’s mind clean of second-hand sites like Gumtree with Marketplace, where Facebook users can sell goods and services. Facebook Marketplace has been growing exponentially, as it just surpassed 1 billion active participants. It looks like Zuckerberg’s plan to use the social media platform’s existing user base to capitalise on folks looking to sell older furniture is paying off.
If anything, this success has proved that Facebook’s push into eCommerce was a solid idea. Beyond the billions users, Marketplace also has a million registered Shops that see around 250 million users every month. That’s a lot of virtual foot traffic.
Marketplace? More like market share
It makes sense that Facebook’s platform would take off the way it has. Given the state of the world and the pandemic still crawling along, people are more likely to purchase goods online rather than go into stores. People are also actively looking to spend less, and one of the best ways to do that is to purchase second-hand goods.
Speaking to the growth during a Facebook earning’s call, CEO Mark Zuckerberg said, “We’re investing in building the future of commerce… We have a long way to go to build out a full-featured commerce platform across our services. This modern commerce system is going to bring together a number of areas where we either already have strong offerings like in ads, community tools and messaging with areas like shops and business messaging and payments.”
While it’s easy to sit here and talk about how Facebook Marketplace is killing off sites like Gumtree, Bidorbuy and Craiglist (not that we in South Africa often use Craiglist) one can’t deny how useful the service is. We’ve picked up many odds and friends through Marketplace in the last year because of how easy and accessible it is for users. So while it may further Facebook’s monopoly, which is obviously bad, we can’t deny that it’s also a very cool feature. Between this and Facebook Gaming, it seems like Zuckerberg is having a very good year.
Source: Engadget