Facebook: the eBay killer?

I have used facebook to sell books and used homeschool curriculum. I accept payment via paypal, and ship via usps. I avoid local pick up, because most people flake out, and no sale results.

Pro:
No ebay fees, just paypal, which means more profit for me

I often get higher prices for curriculum and educational toys than what I would get on ebay. This particular market is often wary of ebay, and is willing to pay a premium to buy from a mom like them, rather than an ebay seller.

Cons:

I have to actively promote my listings. Each forum has it’s own rules for how often you can refresh a listing, how many listings you can have, how many posts in a week, etc. Resellers are often forbidden.

There is a lot of back and forth between seller and potential buyers. It is not a streamlined process at all.

No decent search function in the groups makes it hard for buyers to find your items.

I think it is the nature of certain homeschoolers. They are a little wary of “establishment”, plus they have heard all the stories of bad ebay sellers just waiting to rip them off. Some of them prefer supporting other moms, so they would rather “keep it in the family”.

Some selling groups are closed or private groups, and you have to ask to join. The admin might send you a brief message outlining the rules of the group, (posting frequency, deleting old posts, no general conversations, etc), and verifying you homeschool. Most want to avoid the group being spammed with sales pitches for essential oils, Shakeology shakes, LulaRoe Leggings, and all the other things that have become this generation’s Tupperware Parties. They try to keep it focused on items that are of interest to that community. So books and educational toys your kid no longer uses? Yes. Selling your toddler’s old winter coat or an old set of golf clubs? No.

There are reselling groups, mostly local groups that function kind of like Craigslist. Some people prefer them to Craigslist, because problem members can be easily blocked and booted from the group.

Some individuals also set up personal reselling groups, and invite people to join. I briefly set up a personal group to resell kids books, but abandoned it, because it required a lot of work for a low amount of profit.

There is no way for a buyer to select 10 books, (for example), and put them in a virtual shopping cart, and then check out. What the buyer sees is an album of photos, and they comment on each photo, saying “I want the Winnie the Pooh book, and the Thomas the Train book”. They have to do that for each picture, and comment on what they want. The group owner gets a notification, stating there was a comment on a photo. The owner then has to go to each comment, add up what the buyer wants, then message the buyer to ask for an email address, then send an invoice via Paypal. There’s all this back and forth, and usually for a low amount of money. You can spend several days chasing down $15. Not worth it, IMO.

I’ve bought and sold on Facebook a few times. I belong to quite a few local resale groups and will occasionally browse them. Honestly, I think Craigslist has more to worry about than eBay because all the transactions are local. The same annoyances that come with selling/buying on Craigslist apply to Facebook too. I sold a really nice Nintendo set once for $200 that wasn’t moving on eBay due to the shipping weight. It took a lot of patience though. I had to fend off quite a few annoying dealers who kept messaging me trying to get it for next to nothing and quite a few people who sent messages expressing interest but then fell off the face of the earth before we could seal the deal. Then when I finally sold it the guy that bought it insisted that I hook it up to show it worked before he would pay but didn’t mention he wanted that until he was at my door. Honestly, after that I decided it was better just to buy stuff and leave the selling on those platforms to people with more free time than me.

I called it a few months ago. Facebook is ebay and amazon’s biggest competitor. I think they are going to make craigslist basically obsolete within a couple of years.

My selling experience on FB is mixed. I mostly offer my kids’ stuff and art I thrifted that is large to ship. In the local selling groups once the membership swells, your offerings get buried down in the feed quickly. Also, the item has to be significant enough to coordinate a pickup or people won’t deal. I don’t really want to spend time packing and storing larger framed art but FB has been pretty disappointing. FB and CL I would say are lower pricing than Ebay too. The number of potential buyers is so small by comparison so unless you have a quick flip business model, it doesn’t really pay off. We don’t have offer up, etc. here. One plus to FB is that people are less flaky than CL.

I’ve had some luck on Facebook market place. I also like their feature where you can add all the Facebook yard sale groups to your original post at the time of listing. That really widens my horizon. I am a member of several yard sale groups as I’m in the Boston market.

I have sold several pieces of framed art framed posters etc, photo equipment, some lamps. and other items. It’s always nice when it works out saves me shipping and fees. I only do cash.

I used to sell a lot on craigslist but have found it to be more difficult with so many spammers so now Im focusing on eBay and Facebook. I’ve also had no luck with offer up though I know someone who sells a lot there as well.

I’ve sold a few things on FB, all locally, and most for less than I would have asked on ebay (but items were either large or stuff I just didn’t feel like listing.)

That said, I’m the Co-Admin for our Friends of the Library Facebook page , and I use it to sell used books and movies and music for our local Friends of the Library group. These are all donated items (or library withdrawals) and I sell them for more than we’d get at our Used Book Sales, but still pretty cheap. The focus is only partly on raising money, it’s also to raise our profile in the community, and advertise our used book booth at a local antique/craft mall.

Last year I listed rather sporadically, but this year I’m listing one new item a day (in part because I also list them on local yard sale groups, and some have rules about how many items you can list etc). I think listing every day is helping because I think some people are actually looking to see what I’ve listed. Facebook makes this easy, as you can schedule listings in advance….right now I’m good through I think the 24th. Facebook has also made it easier, as someone said, to create a listing and post it to multiple yard sale sites (as well as the Marketplace). Pick up is at the library, but I do sometimes find myself having to chase down people who never get there to pick up their items.

I agree with those who say FB is more of an immediate threat to CL than to ebay or Amazon. Also, I agree that a lot of stuff is never making it to the thrift store, yard sale, etc, because people are listing it on FB. But that was a concern people had about ebay in the early days too, and we still haven’t run out of sources, so I’m not too worried.