Tired of sharing your Gumtree links on Facebook? What about if Facebook was the marketplace where you sold all your junk? Whoa. That’s what Zuckerbook and Co are testing in Australia right now for limited users.
Facebook Buy And Sell is a new function that the social network is tacking onto its Groups feature. The function has price, location and description fields, and most usefully, has a way to designate items as sold.
Facebook is actually a good (and incredibly lazy) way to sell stuff — there’s no apps to install, fees to pay, and you’re normally selling to someone nearby so there’s no postage hassle or Nigerian mail-order scams involved. So from that perspective, it’s probably a good thing that Facebook is making the process more formal. On the other hand, it’s already annoying and spammy as-is.
The above screenshot, captured yesterday, shows that Facebook already has a series of deals and sales in place in sort of a soft launch mode. We’ve been browsing around and have found the usual crap that you discover on a site like Gumtree or the Trading Post. The killer feature here, however, is that all the classifieds are already on Facebook, making them easy to share with friends and family members, and adding trust over an external marketplace page.
To see if you have it, click here. If you don’t, you’ll see a dead page.
Would you buy and sell your crap on Facebook? Tell us in the comments!
Chris Mills also contributed to this article.