Facebook launching Marketplace in Android app, facilitating easier private buying & selling

Facebook has long been a convenient place to sell unwanted items, but the audience for your sales has so far been limited to your friends and followers. With the addition of a Marketplace feature on mobile, Facebook allows you to expand your audience to everyone in your local community.

Facebook is where people connect, and in recent years more people have been using Facebook to connect in another way: buying and selling with each other. This activity started in Facebook Groups and has grown substantially. More than 450 million people visit buy and sell groups each month — from families in a local neighborhood to collectors around the world.

To help people make more of these connections, today we’re introducing Marketplace, a convenient destination to discover, buy and sell items with people in your community.

Interestingly, Facebook isn’t getting involved in the transactions themselves …

Decided that you want [to buy something]? Send the seller a direct message from Marketplace to tell them you’re interested and make an offer. From that point on, you and the seller can work out the details in any way you choose. Facebook does not facilitate the payment or delivery of items in Marketplace.

You’ll know you’ve got the update when you see a store icon at the bottom of your app between play and world icons. Tap that, and you can then browse or search items for sale.

Selling items is also designed to be extremely simple:

1. Take a photo of your item, or add it from your camera roll
2. Enter a product name, description and price
3. Confirm your location and select a category
4. Post

There are a few, mostly unsurprising, exclusions on what you can sell.

Marketplace is initially launching in the US, UK, Australia and New Zealand – and only in the Android and iOS apps. Facebook says it will come to other countries, and to the web version, in the coming months. Only those members listed as 18 years old and over will get access.

Facebook generally does silent updates to the app, so the first you’ll know about it is the icon appearing at the bottom of the screen. The company’s Messenger app was last month updated to offer fast video chatting.