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Meta Gives Facebook Marketplace Its Own App Called Seller
Seller is part of the Silicon Valley company’s strategy to innovate on its original social network.
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.
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