Exclusive: Facebook launches ‘Marketplace’ to buy and sell used goods and services in India

Finally, Facebook has launched its marketplace in India. The Quikr-Olx kind of platform lists various sellers across categories such as electronics, entertainment, housing, vehicles and five others. It also lets buyers use filters such as price and distance in a particular city.

On the lines of other marketplaces for used goods, sellers can register on the platform by seeding details including product, price, category, location and relevant images. The platform (link) allows buyers to see details like product condition, usages pattern and time of purchase.

Besides listing product, it also aggregates services such as residential properties available on rents, event management, architecture and astrology among others. It also has a classifieds section.

Facebook Marketplace screenshots

Importantly, Marketplace seems not to be available for all users as Entrackr failed to access it with different individual accounts.

Currently, it seems that marketplace has a lot of bugs and Facebook needs to strengthen its quality control mechanism. For instance, an Audi car is listed on the platform with Re 1 price tag. Entrackr has discovered several such discrepancies in products and pricing on the marketplace.

The idea of Facebook Marketplace is based on the analytics of the number of users worldwide, which is as high as 550 million, visit various groups in the social networking website to buy and sell each month.

The marketplace, which is already up and running in 35 countries, has started a pilot in Mumbai in November 2017. At that time, Facebook mentioned that Indian users are primarily buying and selling jewellery and accessories, household goods, electronics and apparels on the platform.

India is a home to around 241 million Facebook users, which accounts 11 per cent of the total users and the largest in the world. Given that people in India spend significant time on the social network and they already leverage various groups on Facebook to buy and sell used goods. Facebook Marketplace is slated to give stiff competition to incumbents like Olx and Quikr.