@katzrul15 wrote:
I am talking about the same........droves of people are using it right now, presumably to avoid the fees or reduced fees. Once that changes, how popular will it actually be? Think it is a short time away from having to be more structured, different fees that now, etc.
Right now I mostly just use it for stuff I don't want to sell here to sell locally or occasionally ship it out.
I believe Facebook will at some point raise their fees. They've made a few changes since last I used it, but was still really buggy at that time at least. Might not be an issue now, but would constantly have issues just changing the price or update the listing in some way for instance. Wouldn't let me and you can't just recreate the listing because it would sometimes not let you delete it for some reason. And you can't use the same photos because it does a hash check on them and says these photos are used in a different listing. So now you have to modify the photos a little.
In any event, once they get a lot of their kinks worked out. I think they'll at least double the fees. I suppose they could do what CraigsList does and I think only charge for listings in San Francisco and it's mostly free elsewhere. But the way it is now with free and 5%. They are probably at best breaking even on the marketplace. Could even be losing money.
Having said that, they probably can afford to break even or lose money (and continue to break even to keep people using the marketplace) because they'll be making money off of you based on what you're browsing for and buying.
Facebook makes tons of money off of ads and selling your data. Noticed you're looking at or buying a lot of furniture on Facebook lately. They might start showing you ads for furniture stores. Or drill down to the type of furniture and see it's mostly baby stuff. So maybe they'll start showing ads for baby furniture or clothes or whatever else is baby related. Whatever makes sense for their AI. Not to mention third parties will get that data and use it somehow.
