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Many of us open Meta’s native social media app just to browse listings on Facebook Marketplace. Now, sellers get a new standalone app to help manage their listings, Declared dead Friday.
The app is called Seller, and it is now available for download iOS and Android. You don’t have to download the app to sell stuff on Facebook, but it’s designed to give you better ways to manage your listings and interact with buyers.
You’ll have all of your Marketplace history in the seller app once you log in with your Facebook account. On the home page, you can get an overview of all your activities and reminders about the tasks you need to do to complete the sales. There is a dedicated data insights tab, which may be useful for people trying to turn their reselling hobby into a real business. The Messages Inbox should 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 its marketplace and groups. These two features kept people coming back to the app even while they relied on other apps for their social networks. But it is not only the market that is branching out; Meta is trialling a groups-only app called Forum, and Facebook Creator Studio is getting a revamp as well.
The reason behind these new applications is the same reason any tech company does anything nowadays: artificial intelligence.
“Underlying our new apps is the belief that we can leverage AI to remove friction and empower the people who make things on Facebook,” wrote Tom Allison, Facebook president. In a blog post. Don’t want to write lists? Make AI do it. Can’t find an old post in your community group? Conduct AI research. You get the idea.
But when you use Marketplace in the Facebook app, you can easily verify someone’s profile before interacting with them — an important security check that sellers and buyers do to avoid being scammed. Meta’s solution to this is to introduce validation tags everywhere on Facebook.
If you want a verification mark, you can upload a selfie of yourself. If it matches your profile picture, you’re probably ready to move on. All of this suggests that a real person, not an AI bot, is behind the account. You can be scammed by a real person just as easily as a bot, so keep looking for other red flags when buying and selling.
While the new Marketplace app may be useful for energy sellers, it’s a strange move on Meta’s part to pull its most popular features into separate apps. Perhaps in an attempt to thwart the flood of people who won’t return to Facebook if Marketplace and Groups are removed, the company is introducing a new format in which videos play as soon as you open the app — like TikTok. This may come to the US next year.
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