The categories should be familiar to people who spend time on Craiglist.
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Facebook is testing a new section of its app and website called Local Markets, which will be a place for users to buy and sell goods and that will compete with the likes of Craigslist. Not only that, but also users can customize and filter items into different collections to easily find the stuff they are searching for. So it’s a safe bet that Local Market will work partly by aggregating listings from across a range of Facebook For Sale groups, so long as the seller opts to crosspost their item. Judging by some posts seen on Twitter, it looks like Facebook has been testing the feature for a a few weeks now. According to the company’s product chief Chris Cox, this new addition known as Local Market will provide users the opportunity to sell their old stuff.
Facebook Inc. (NASDAQ: FB) is launching its own buy and sell craigslist-like feature. Expanding that out to a dedicated marketplace based on geographical location is a logical next step.
The option to post to “Local Market” also showed up when someone created a post in a local selling group on Facebook. Those sale groups have definitely grown in popularity over the year, with many groups being organized locally as virtual garage sales that are always ongoing. The new feature offers new ways to search for various categories of items, without being limited to specific groups, but rather the geography of the user.
It sounds like plenty of other features are being tested for the Local Market, including recommendations, saved searches, notifications and more. But there’s no word on whether this will launch broadly – the test appears to only be live in Melbourne and Sydney, Australia as well as Auckland, New Zealand.
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The new feature is a lightweight video advertisement made from a series of still images, which is easy for advertisers to use and is engaging for people, the company said in a blog post.
