Facebook Marketplace for cars
Interested in buying a car through Facebook? Well social media giant has Marketplace now with a dedicated section for vehicles.
Car buyers can search filters to find a vehicle with a specific type, make, model, mileage, transmission. Search volume in Facebook’s peer-to-peer classifieds directory that launched a year ago has grown 3X globally since the start of 2017, with 18 million listings being added in the US alone in May. There’s also been 77% growth in unique conversations between buyers and sellers over the first half of this year.
Bowen Pan who is a Facebook product manager said:
“Autos are one of the most popular categories of Marketplace. Millions of people in the US alone are looking at used cars, motorbikes, and other vehicle listings every day”
Facebook Marketplace grew out of the rampant emergent behaviour of people creating buy-and-sell Facebook Groups and as a result, the Marketplace team followed these usage trends in order to build the new vehicle features.
Facebook doesn’t take a cut of any Marketplace transactions. But a few months back it started testing ads within Marketplace to promote certain products. You can imagine that dealerships would happily pay for ads if they could land them a car buyer.
Facebook Marketplace is now putting the spotlight on cars and this strategy is just part of Facebook’s ambitious plans for the commerce platform.
Facebook is also working on helping people land jobs, buy tickets through Ticketmaster, discover daily deals through eBay, browse retail products from the Shop sections of Pages, and next, Facebook plans to tackle real estate so you can find a house or apartment.
The advantage of Facebook Marketplace is the fact that people do not need to set up a new account as you can visit the app at any time and have visibility into people’s profiles and social graphs.
Author
Justin Kavanagh
Justin Kavanagh is a recognised leader
in automotive intelligence and vehicle
data supply to the entire motor industry.
He has almost 20 years experience in
building systems from the ground up.
As the Managing Director of Vehicle
Management System, he understands the
need and importance of trustworthy and
reliable vehicle history and advice to
both the trade and the public.
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