Many of us only open Meta’s original social media app to browse listings on Facebook Marketplace. Now, sellers are getting a new standalone app to help manage their listings, Meta announced on Friday.
The app is called Seller, and it’s available now to download on iOS and Android. You don’t have to download the app to sell things on Facebook, but it is designed to offer you better ways to manage your listings and interact with buyers.
You’ll have all your Marketplace history in the Seller app once you log in with your Facebook account. On the homepage, you get an overview of all your activity and reminders about tasks you need to do to complete sales. There’s a dedicated data insights tab, which would be useful for people trying to turn their reselling hobby into a real business. The messages inbox would presumably help keep your conversations with potential buyers separate from chats with your friends and family in Messenger.
Facebook’s core strengths in the TikTok era have been Marketplace and Groups. These two features kept people coming back to the app even as they relied on other apps for their social networking. But it’s not just Marketplace that’s branching out; Meta is experimenting with a Groups-only app called Forum, and the Facebook Creator Studio is getting a revamp, too.
The reason behind these new apps is the same reason any tech company does anything nowadays: artificial intelligence.
“Underlying our new apps is a belief that we can leverage AI to remove friction and empower the people who are making things happen on Facebook,” Tom Alison, head of Facebook, wrote in a blog post. Don’t want to write listings? Have AI do it. Can’t find an old post in your community group? Do an AI search. You get the idea.
But when you use Marketplace in the Facebook app, you’re able to easily check out a person’s profile before interacting with them – an important safety check that sellers and buyers do to avoid getting scammed. Meta’s solution to this is to introduce verification check marks everywhere on Facebook.
If you want a verification mark, you can upload a selfie of yourself. If it matches your profile picture, you’re likely good to go. All this does is indicate that a real person, not an AI bot, is behind an account. You can get scammed just as easily by a real person as a bot, so keep on the lookout for other red flags when buying and selling.
While the new Marketplace app may be good for power sellers, it’s a curious move by Meta to siphon off its most popular features into separate apps. Perhaps in an attempt to stymie the flood of people who won’t return to Facebook if Marketplace and Groups are removed, the company is introducing a new format that has videos playing as soon as you open the app – like TikTok. This may be coming to the US next year.
See full bio
Read the full article here