Facebook Marketplace vs Craigslist: Which one is better?
$365 over the last 26 days
Since Coronavirus changed everything in the US in mid-March, I haven’t been taking donations to the thrift store since they haven’t been taking donations. I had quite a pile saved up and just resigned myself to holding onto these items until the coast was clear. The corner of my basement was unusable.
A few months (years?) have passed and not much has changed about donating items or clothes. There was no end in sight and no plan to begin receiving donations in my area. So I decided to try and sell a few of these items to clear out space in my basement.
I knew I would get instant interest in a few items, but others shocked me. I had listed a water table and Little Tikes slide on Nextdoor as ‘Free’, with no takers. I even set them by the side of the road in the “free stuff zone” with no action over the course of a week.
I took 1 picture of each item and put them on Facebook marketplace and within 1 hour, I had multiple offers for $5 for each. Somebody came and took them both and I was hooked. $10 for stuff I couldn’t give away!
I even had two old sawhorses, homemade the were falling apart. They needed a screw to be fully functional. I took 2 pictures and listed them and I had tons of interest. I sold them for $5 and got some space back in my basement.
Before I had moved, I had used craigslist almost solely for all selling of junk from my house, so why am I using Facebook marketplace more now?
- Facebook marketplace has a built-in chat system. You don’t need to use them, but they sure make correspondence faster. You can even see if they read your chat, which makes the selling cycle a lot faster.
- Facebook marketplace also has built-in chat. If you have Paypal, you can connect it to your account and receive & make payments that way. Otherwise, I use Venmo & Cashapp as well with buyers.
- Huge audience. Facebook is the largest social network in the world and marketplace really reflects that. The Facebook algorithm knows how to target people for their ads and uses that same functionality to target people for your stuff.
