Facebook Introduces Marketplace, a place where you can Buy or Sell items within your local community

Facebook has introduced it's own service called Marketplace and this is clearly no new service from what we've had from the likes of eBay and OLX which is surprisingly doing good in growing economies like Africa, Facebook is also joining the competition and this is likely a good move by the social media giant.

Many Facebook users have lately gravitated towards creating Sales groups to buy and sell new and used products on the platform and it only makes sense to have such a thing built within the Facebook App to ease such activity.

With Marketplace you will be able to tap a new icon that will be added within the Facebook app and quickly search through available products posted by users within your location and if pleased by something, you will be able to initiate conversation with the owner of that specific item to carry on with the negotiations to buy that item if you wish.

In case you need to sell something, you will simply take a picture of that specific item, new or old, add a description, price and location to it and then post. Plain simple as that. Facebook will then display items basing on the location indicated basically bring items closest to your location on top of the list.

Users will also be able to post both within Marketplace and any Sales group on Facebook at once if they desired.

click on image to enlarge

Also important to note that Facebook doesn't take part in the transaction or charge anything to have products sold on the platform. It also doesn't protect the buyer in case the item sold turns out to be faulty in any way. All negotiations are solely between buyer and seller.

Does it benefit Facebook in any way? Of course it does. With a service many users will be drawn to the platform and the more users spend time on Facebook, the more Facebook gains when pushing it's own adverts to users. At the end of the day, this will profit both Facebook and users.

Marketplace currently available in the US, UK, Australia and New Zealand on the Facebook app for iPhone and Android with plans to extend it to more countries in the next months.