Ten years ago, when Meta noticed that millions of Facebook users were buying and selling items on its platform, it spun up a part of the app called Facebook Marketplace for them to do just that.
Since then, Marketplace has become one of the most popular parts of Facebook, where people go for what is essentially the internet’s largest garage sale of clothes, furniture and used cars. On Friday, Meta capitalized on that popularity with the launch of Seller, a stand-alone app for Marketplace sellers.
The move was part of Meta’s strategy to innovate on its original social network. In May, the Silicon Valley company released an app called Forum for people who use Facebook Groups, another core part of Facebook, as it tries to nurture Facebook’s most popular communities beyond its news feed.
Tom Alison, the head of Facebook, said the Marketplace app would be to sellers what tools to edit videos were to content creators.
“I think about these as things that complement the main app, and cater to the more high-intensity user communities,” he said in an interview. “That’s the idea that underpins a lot of what we’re doing this year or trying this year. It’s very early — it’s experimental.”
Facebook, which Mark Zuckerberg founded in his dorm room at Harvard in 2004, has faced questions in recent years about its relevance as other social media apps like Instagram gained popularity. While Meta has shifted its focus to artificial intelligence, the company still makes nearly all of its revenue from advertising on Facebook and Instagram. That money also funds its A.I. investments, which could be as high as $145 billion this year.
Facebook Marketplace has been a hit that has kept people — especially younger users — interested in Facebook. A third of the young adults who use Facebook each day also use Marketplace, Mr. Alison said. Every month, more than 430 million items, including 44 million vehicles, are listed on Marketplace globally.
Last year, Meta created a plan for a new slate of apps to cater to Facebook’s “power users,” whom Mr. Alison described as “the people that are making stuff happen.” Beyond traditional content creators, they include sellers on Marketplace and users who run their own Facebook Groups.
Users can sign into Seller with their Facebook accounts, which will sync their old listings of items that are for sale. From there, people can navigate between their inbox, a dashboard with data on old listings and a tool to create new ones.
Seller is free and will also be available in web browsers for users who download the app. Meta makes money from Marketplace from advertisements on the app and does not take a cut of sales.
Seller also includes new A.I. features, like scanning photos with A.I. to fill out listings automatically. The goal of the A.I. features is to make selling items less of a hassle without replacing the human elements, Mr. Alison said, which is why many people go to Marketplace in the first place.
“The thing that makes the product the most interesting is, you’re meeting somebody on the other side of it,” he added.
Meta on Friday also introduced a “human verification” feature for Facebook that allows users to upload video selfies to verify that they are real people. The free feature gives users who verify themselves a gray badge next to their profile name, so users can trust they are talking to a real person and not a bot.
Some Facebook Marketplace users who have made the platform their livelihood said they were excited to try Seller.
“All my business comes from Facebook,” said Claire Whittaker, 53, who was a waitress in San Francisco when she sold her first ceramic succulent bowl on Marketplace in the summer of 2022. That sale snowballed into a full-time business selling plants and bowls, which she does almost exclusively on Marketplace from her apartment.
“Marketplace has changed a lot since then — it’s gotten better,” Ms. Whittaker said, adding that the feature she most wants to see in a new Marketplace app is customer service. “If it makes my job easier, I’ll give it a try.”
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