You’re probably familiar with Facebook’s popular “Garage Sale” pages which allow members to buy and sell second-hand goods with nearby locals. Today, the social media giant kicked it up a notch. The Buy & Sell page is a new, invite-only marketplace that is currently being trialed around Australia. It’s essentially eBay/Gumtree — but on Facebook.
Buy And Sell is a new function Facebook is adding to Groups, which you can find on the left-hand side of your Facebook page (see right).
Currently, the function is only being rolled out to a select number of Facebook accounts. (Curiously, the feature has also been disappearing for some users, which suggests some fine-tuning and tweaking is still taking place.)
The function has price, location and description fields, and most usefully, has a way to designate items as sold.
Despite the soft and experimental launch, there is already a selection of user items for sale as you can see in the lead photo above. Not that any of them are especially worth clicking on or anything. Still, it’s obviously early days at the moment.
So how do you get access? If you have already joined one of Facebook’s community-run Garage Sale pages, your chances should be a little higher.
If you have a bunch of unwanted junk lying around, Facebook is actually a pretty useful platform to spruik it on: unlike eBay it doesn’t take a cut of the proceeds. Plus, the function automatically groups communities based on location which removes the hassle and cost of postage. Naturally, you also have a much larger audience — or will have, after the official launch.
To see if you have it, click here. If you don’t, you’ll see a dead page.
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2 responses to “Facebook Takes On Ebay With New Buy & Sell Tool”
Well, eBay will probably be extinct in five years time …
The reality is, the eBay/PayPal “split” is no split at all, these two clunky operators are effectively still joined at the hip and, neither has much future—not even PayPal once the sham “spin-off” arrangement between these two unscrupulous entities eventually expires, and, even without the destructive guiding hand of the cretinous, ex Bain & Co., Johnny Ho, the eBay marketplace will likely continue on its journey down the toilet …
PayPal may presently be viewed favourably in the eyes of many naïve online payers but not so in the eyes of many of the small business payees that invariably bear the brunt of PayPal’s clunky, unregulated, faux “banking” operations. The fact is, generally speaking, “PreyPal” is licensed only as a “money transmitter”, not as a prudentially regulated “bank” and, in the main, operates as an intermediary, a “merchant of sorts” (PayPal’s own words) that rides, parasitically, on the back of the retail banks’ existing payment systems via a merchant account with one of those very retail banks …
The reality is, these two unscrupulous commercial entities still very much need each other; in particular, the clunky “PreyPal” desperately still needs the business it gets from eBay—hence the five-year “80%” exclusivity agreement put in place to try to maximise and underpin PayPal’s market value; regardless, as eBay continues to atrophy, as it undoubtedly will, so too will “PreyPal” atrophy, and if “PreyPal” does not simply whither away along with eBay, then there are now a number of other more professional operators that are presently preparing the hole in the ground for clunky PayPal’s ultimate interment …
Undoubtedly, Apple Pay, Samsung Pay, Android Pay, et al, will soon enough overwhelm PayPal’s petty and clunky contribution to mobile payments (next time you visit Home Depot, ask the cashier how “Pay Here With PayPal” is going—LOL); methinks Facebook Payments will likely soon bury PayPal in the person-to-person (C2C) payments sphere (David Marcus certainly made the right move); and the new online retail payments offerings from the world’s retail banks via MasterCard (“MasterPass”) and Visa (“Visa Checkout”) will eventually bury PayPal’s online payments operations also—except on the likes of the atrophying eBay marketplace where PayPal’s “spin-off” from eBay—a spin-off that eBay’s Johnny Ho fought tooth and nail against—will go down as the greatest corporate “pea and thimble” trick of the twenty-first century …
Having said that, it should be noted that, being into the eighth (and final) year of his failed “three-year turnaround” of eBay, and in the process thereof having brought the eBay marketplace virtually to its knees, the cretinous Johnny Ho has now removed his destructive capabilities from eBay to the spun-off PayPal, and that being the case, potential long term investors should be warned that they invest in either eBay’s or PayPal’s future at their very great peril; indeed, existing eBay/PayPal shareholders should cash in their shares and run—that’s the only way they are ever likely to get a cash dividend out of either …
In August 2007, immediately prior to the GFC, the cretinous Johnny Ho was already effectively in control of eBay and both eBay’s and Amazon’s shares were ~$40. How do these shares compare now?
AMZN ~$533; PYPL ~$39; EBAY ~$28—LOL …
“Money, not morality, is the principle of commerce …”—Thomas Jefferson.
Demonstrably, that principle applies, in spades, to both eBay and “PreyPal” …
And, not even the criminal code gets in the way of commerce at eBay Inc. eBay will directly cheat sellers, and calculatingly facilitate and aid and abet the defrauding of buyers by others as long as there is a benefit in such activity for them—Google “Shill Bidding on eBay: Case Study #5” …
eBay’s naïve fanboys and paid shills should worry; in five years time when the current exclusivity agreement between these two unscrupulous commercial entities expires, they will both most likely be by then in the palliative care ward, and methinks that Carl Icahn may be by then applying reverse pressure to get (then) PayPal’s cretinous Johnny Ho to agree to allow eBay to re-buy the dying “PreyPal”, or for “PreyPal” to buy the dying eBay, (either way for 99c) so that they can both better attempt to continue underwriting each others’ atrophying revenues …
And, eBay looks set to take a ~$1.5 billion bath on the sale of its Enterprise unit for $925 million. Needless to say this unit was another of the cretinous Johnny Ho’s brilliant acquisitions …
The eBay executive suite—where the incompetent mingle with the disingenuous, the malevolent and the outright criminal, and the just plain stupid …
Whoa. Quite a diatribe.
But I will be happy when PayPal go, or at least are regulated like a bank.
Hi Can you please help me, my darling Mum passed away, 1 week ago today, it is her Birthday today, she has been very sick, so I did not put any new listings up, for a while, now they have closed my account, I did contact them yesterday, this was there reply, last night a person from the Phillipines or somewhere like that, asked me to send a copy of my mother death certificate to them, so they could consider to allow me to sell on ebay. Where to from here.
Hi Sue,
Thank you for contacting eBay in regard to the suspension of your account.
I’m very sorry to hear about your recent loss. Please accept my sincere condolences at what must be a very distressing time.
I understand that you are concerned regarding the reason of your account suspension. Please know that after reviewing the details on your account for appeal, we have determined that it is in our mutual best interest to part ways. Because your actions have not complied with eBay site policy, we have decided that you will no longer be able to participate on the site. Our investigating department has found out that your information and your selling behaviour is not in accordance with ebay’s guidlines for a safe trading environment.
Unfortunately, as a result of this action, your account will remain suspended indefinitely. Further communication in this regard will not result in the in the reinstatement of your account.
Again, eBay desires a safe and positive buying/selling environment for each of our members. Although this decision is unfortunate, it was done with the entire eBay Community in mind.
I wish you the very best in all future endeavours.
Kind regards,
Bryan E.
eBay Customer Support