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Social Media probably has a place in the buy sell market, particularly for larger local pick-up items that are not viable to post. I don't have an FB account, but the wife and kids occasionally use it to buy and sell local stuff. Works OK but you definitely get a lot more tyre kickers and time wasters on social media. One interesting exercise, was we listed our daughters local netball uniform on FB and ebay, not expecting ebay to be in the race. It sold in 3 hours on ebay to a FIFO miner in another state, who's daughter had just moved to our town with her mum and wanted to play netball. ( all legit as she picked it up ) Take that FB.....
We recently sold a caravan on FB. It took months to sell, everyone that inquired wanted it for half the listed price and very few genuine enquiries. Eventually we found a serious buyer who paid what it was worth, but it was a pretty painful experience all round.
All up social media can be useful if you are just clearing up some large junk that is never going to sell interstate or overseas, but you could never run a serious business completely from social media. The time wasters and low ball offers would drive you nuts and there is not the systems and processes in place to keep business records for tax etc.
For serious professional sellers ( even small single person operators like me ) ebay leaves social media for dead when it comes to running a small professional, online business. Different strokes for different folks. Social media for amateurs and home owners selling larger items for local pick-up, Ebay for the professionals who genuinely want to run serious businesses, selling Australia wide and internationally.
@purplemon18 wrote:That's a pretty poorly written article without proper sourcing of this data, but it seems like they are actually talking about social media advertising, not the facebook marketplace.
Must admit, I never opened the link but I bet you are right.
I have succumbed to some of the advertising on facebook, I have to admit. Bought a set of icing nozzles to make amazing flower shapes. Don't know how they work yet, we'll see. I may live to regret the purchase.
FB is actually a bit of a pain as there is so much advertising in the feed.
Don't know though about anyone else, but a lot of the advertising is for things I have looked at on ebay.
Sometimes even things I have clicked on just to look at from links here on the messageboards (which is why I often don't click into things mentioned here as I don't want to see those things for the next month.)
But my impression is that far from stealing customers away from ebay, some of that FB advertising that comes up in feeds might even be steering people back here if they have popped in to look at anything.
@purplemon18 wrote:That's a pretty poorly written article without proper sourcing of this data, but it seems like they are actually talking about social media advertising, not the facebook marketplace.
It's all pretty vague but I doubt they're talking about all that money being spent just on things from paid advertisements that come up in people's feeds. They say fb leads with 22% of sales but they don't actually say what the 22% relates to - is it all online sales or is it 22% of social media sales? They quote the top four or five leading social media platforms (for sales) but they only add up to 39%. 39% of WHAT?? Maybe that 'news' article is a paid advertisement by facebook or other social media. 
I'd like to know where they get their figures from because those platforms have absolutely no way of knowing how much is sold through them - unless they're reading all our private messages to see how much money changes hands. Whenever I mark a fb post as sold (or delete a post) a questionnaire pops up asking did I sell it or not, but I always selected "I'd rather not say". A lot of the time it didn't actually sell and I'm just marking it as sold so the post isn't visible to most people. If they assume it did sell, that would distort their figures. If it did sell, they have no way of knowing what price I got or how many I sold for that price. I don't use any of the other platforms but I'd imagine they'd be much the same.
There are at least five ways to sell on fb and it's obvious from some of the comments here that a lot of people haven't looked into it.
1. Paid advertising
2. Marketplace
3. Local buy/sell/swap groups
4. Specialised selling groups, eg. Royal Albert china, cross stitch kits, gardening, jewellery, handmade craft items, etc, etc etc etc.
5. Your own business page (often linked to your own website).
Marketplace and local buy/sell/swap groups are more for pick-up items, whether they be large items or smaller items that would cost more than they're worth to post. For buyers, there are some fantastic bargains to be had on marketplace so I think it'd probably work best for cheaper items that you want to get rid of quickly.
I know of a few ebay sellers who have their own business page and they have thousands of followers so that probably translates to a lot of sales. I've got a business page but I find the pages are hard to load so I've never referred my ebay customers to it. It'd be extra work constantly updating it but I should make more effort with it..
Specialised selling groups are the best place to sell items that need to be mailed but group rules vary considerably. Some of the admins are worse than ebay when it comes to dictating what sellers can and can't do! Some of the admins can't string a proper sentence together and are completely incompetent. This can result in chaos and new groups are constantly starting up while others sink into oblivion. Find the right groups and you can do quite well if you're prepared to put the work in.
I watched Small Business Secrets on SBS a few times and found the segment on social media quite interesting. They said that most successful businesses have a fb page. They may not actually sell anything on fb but it's a way of getting known and also getting recommendations. People are more likely to try a new coffee shop if it's got a few good reviews on fb.
For people to automatically dismiss fb is to be short-sighted. Someone here did just that when I mentioned it once before but their items would probably sell well in a dedicated group with 50,000+ members. Now they're complaining about their ebay sales but fb would have more than made up for it.
