Facebook: The Missing Manual, 3rd Edition

Chapter 9. Going Shopping

As part of its quest to be the only website you ever need to visit, Facebook partnered with Oodle (a company that specializes in online classifieds) a while back to come up with an easy way for Facebook members to buy and sell stuff from each other. The result: An amped-up third-party application called Marketplace that replaces the original, built-in Facebook Marketplace feature. (The term “third-party” just means it was created by someone other than the programmers at Facebook.)

The Marketplace application is easy to find and add to your Facebook Account. And unlike the classifieds in your local paper or ads on Craigslist.org or eBay, on Facebook, you can comb through listings placed by friends, friends of friends, or fellow coworkers or students. And if you don’t personally know the person who placed the ad, you can learn about him before you contact him. As you’ll see in this chapter, you can use Facebook Marketplace to buy or sell just about anything.

Note

Marketplace still isn’t quite the seller-packed, go-to shopping haunt that eBay is—yet. What it is spectacularly useful for is facilitating local sales: those Chihuahua puppies you want to get rid of, those textbooks gathering dust in the corner, that on-campus job you want to fill. Anything of special interest to your friends or fellow network members is a prime candidate for Marketplace.

The Marketplace Application

Marketplace is a Facebook application (see Chapter 13) that lets you post and answer ...