Dive Brief:
- Facebook is working to make the Marketplace tab in its app more attractive to businesses by offering more professional products and services, according to a report in Recode.
- In the tab, Facebook displays job postings and "daily deals" in conjunction with eBay, and also plans to add new categories such as ticket sales in the same vein as Ticketmaster and products from retailers' official sites.
- The change in Marketplace reflects a popularity around auto sales, in particular, Facebook VP Deb Liu told Recode, as well as real estate listings for apartments. The goal in expanding Marketplace is to drive transactions to one spot on the Facebook app instead of forcing users to find ticket sales or auto deals scattered around News Feed.
Dive Insight:
Facebook may be the second-largest hub for digital advertising in the world, but in terms of actually driving e-commerce sales, it's not top of the conversation compared to e-commerce-focused sites like Amazon. Expanding Marketplace to better accommodate e-commerce transactions suggests the feature, first launched in October as a competitor to Craigslist, is seeing some serious legs and might be propped up as a way for Facebook to better compete with the Amazons and Walmarts of the world.
At the time of launch, Marketplace wasn't open to brands, instead being limited to user postings, but the latest news from Recode sees the feature potentially courting more big-name businesses. Centralizing e-commerce transactions to one tab also points to how Facebook is attempting to centralize and optimize its browsing experience in order to keep its 2 billion users active and happy.
Marketplace starting to offer ticket sales also comes amid rumblings that Amazon is prepping a direct challenger to compete with sites like Ticketmaster and eBay's StubHub. The combined bits of news points to how digital platforms are expanding their reach in a bid to both collect more data from their massive user bases and also boost revenue and business interest.
