Buy/sell/trade Facebook groups are hugely popular - whether you’re selling fashion, equipment, furniture or offloading some things you don’t need, there’s usually a Facebook group that fits the bill.
While they started off a bit like a guerilla Gumtree, these groups are now a big part of Facebook’s ecosystem - a 'sell" button helps buyers list an item for sale within a group, or in the Facebook market place.
Buyers can use the “message seller” button to get in touch about the sale, or negotiate the price in the comments. I’ve seen people selling anything from clothes, furniture, baby items, to food, to $75,000 engagement rings.
Would love to find out about your experiences, and what questions you might have about buying and selling through the Facebook platform.
I don’t use Facebook for much at all and rather infrequently. So I certainly don’t use it for buying or selling goods. The data capture of Facebook is so enormous it is a huge privacy issue in my opinion. While others such as EBay or Amazon collect your purchase/selling habits they generally do not have that much access to your more intimate (here I mean friends, families, photos, likes and dislikes, and so on) personal/private information as Facebook does.
I have used Facebook, eBay, and Gumtree to sell new and secondhand goods. Each is suitable for different items and different locations. When I lived in Canberra I didn’t use Facebook groups apart from Freecycle—Canberrans used Gumtree rather than FB.
Since moving to rural NSW I have found that very few people use Gumtree; it seems to work better with a larger population. On Facebook there are at least six groups for buying and selling (not including specialty groups such as Buy/sell cars) that are based in my shire and cover my town. This is something of a problem since one really has to advertise on all of the groups when selling and watch all of the groups when buying.
Through Facebook I have bought and sold furniture, kitchen items, and a car. The car was advertised on two local vehicle-specific groups as well is the marketplace and on Gumtree. I had only one enquiry overall and this was after about four weeks. The buyer was local and had found the car on the Facebook marketplace.
More recently when selling another car, I had no responses to either Facebook or Gumtree ads (other than one scam enquiry thorough Gumtree). In the end we sold the car through an ad placed on the noticeboard at a local supermarket. So for cars there seems to be a certain amount of luck involved.
I also use some specialty, national Facebook groups for selling specialty items, such as homeschooling books, and hand dyed yarn. As far as I know these are the main marketplaces for such items.
I use Facebook, and have joined a couple of buying/selling groups in this area, but bailed from them because:
1, there seemed to be some sort of code which I never found explained to express an interest in items
2, when I looked into things more, there seemed to be lots of sellers were running small undeclared businesses
3, most of the stuff advertised was not of interest
4, I couldn’t work out how to search for/locate items which I was looking for
5, the stuff that was of interest seemed to be too expensive
6, many ads appeared over several groups, so I was being notified of the same uninteresting item over and over.
7, there was no way to filter what you were notified about.
8, I have concerns about FB’s adding information about what I look at, buy/sell to what it is already storing.
I have been using Gumtree for years, and have both bought and sold there. The only down side is occasionally scam artist(s) respond to new ads.
If Facebook was a circus, the shopping group is where you’d find all the clowns. Less than no rules.
Yes I’ve used it - as @jen mentioned Gumtree seems to less popular in some places, where I am is one such place. FB groups seem to be the main thing - and did I mention no rules? FB ‘community standards’ make me feel bilious - so I unfollow them all unless I am specifically looking for something. The privacy issue is a big thing for some, and while I tend to think we don’t have any I accept and respect that some people cling to this fading concept but then most of the time sanity feels like just a concept … (insert manic laugh here …).
I don’t do facebook and never will and am getting sick of everyone, including govt., pushing us all towards fb instead of setting something up that will actually protect us online (just a little)… even the govts new cyber security website (cyber.gov.au) points people to fb which gives me no confidence in the Govts cyber department.
If you’re not a fb member you can’t go far in the site without fb constantly trying to sign you up and you can’t even view the whole page without signing up… so much for “seeing more and staying smart online on facebook”.
Gumtree I have used and it lets me see ads without constantly being hassled to login… however, Gumtree uses some 35 trackers on their initial homepage (fb only uses one…their own, which feeds out to many many more). I block trackers and sometimes that stops certain sites from working (esp. youtube & fb) but Gumtree still seems stable with trackers blocked.
You could assume that the Govt want you to use FB as the information FB hold on you can be accessed by Warrant or perhaps by similar means such as a simple request (though FB say the requests need to be “legally sufficient” whatever that may mean in a particular jurisdiction). I haven’t seen much about FB taking action to block Govt access to data and from data provided about the first half of 2017 they provided the data requested in about 85% of cases with around 33,000 requests being made (so around 28,000 were completed).
I heard they were considering it as the myGov replacement
I’m not sure that the UK company Gumtree, owned by Ebay, is a poster child of online privacy and safety - though their ‘narrower than FB’ focus is online sales, they still collect a vast amount of data that can be accessed easily with a warrant.
I see less, but my pi-hole has probably pi-holed most of them before the badger. I don’t see sites break though? unless pi-hole has holed them completely …
I have used Gumtree, ebay, Facebook, carsales, etc for disposal of unwanted items. I also restore bench seats and have found that FB marketplace (local areas) is by far the best with items selling within a day and with no lack of interest. It is also no cost. I will also occasionally buy something on marketplace and have had nothing but good experiences. However when selling a car I was inundated with “is this available” messages, but then no follow up. I eventually sold it through a personal contact. Carsales is too expensive.
That is of some concern but the thing that bothers me as a buyer is items coming up on searches on google and within Gumtree when the item is not available at all. They seem to go to some trouble to get their stock into your results on the hope that you might change your mind and buy something altogether different. Wasting my time does not get me to buy.
I agree, and the types of things that appear make it clear it isn’t random, regardless (or irregardless) of how much we try and cloak things.
I wonder how many people do buy though? It’s like spam … it is spam … conversion rates are they key, and they don’t care about my time or yours, they care about our dollars or ‘assets’ - more specifically how to convert same into their dollars. My view is their single fundamental care is about profit. There is only the facade of ‘care’ or ‘social responsibility’ or ‘ethics’ or anything the punter out here might feel ‘good’ about when it can be directly linked to their profit. It seems to me that ‘good’ small businesses stay small if they stay ‘good’ - to succeed on a large scale requires the business to shed limiting attachments to being ‘good’ and convert their model to ‘evil’, while buying lots of ‘good’ paint and applying it liberally to every external surface in an effort to keep an (un)suspecting public fooled … That said, there will never be enough paint to hide the evils of Facebook et al …
That is salesmanship 101, not in a good way. A salesman tries to sell what he has if he does not have what the customer came for. That is not to suggest a good salesman will sell something the customer does not want or that is inappropriate, it is that the good salesman tries to change the customers mind or perspective toward what he has on offer.
A person that does not have what you came for yet does not try to offer you something they have that you might like anyway is an order taker, not a salesman.
Dumb down the concept for software platforms and that is a reason there are so many useless hits across the board from online merchants of all sorts.
‘Hey mate, come have a look at what I have - you might like something’
Exactly. The designers have missed the point that most people can only deal effectively with a list of a roughly few dozen items. If it gets over 100 you will lose a few and should they be forced to scroll through the lot those who persist will be wasting time that is probably better spent. Once it gets over 1000 the ranking algorithm and the SEOs who manipulate it are in charge not the user. As for millions of hits…
They say that no one ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American public, or anywhere else in the world for that matter, but overestimating their patience and persistence is really dumb when your software is capable of reducing the list to what they might actually want.
The concept sounds terrifying! I was on Facebook briefly, but decided that I had too much self-respect to remain on the platform.
I have bought and sold using Ebay. If I ever get around to figuring out Gumtree I may try it as well.
Very sensible. I seem to recall having trouble with Youtube and my ad/tracking-blockers in the past, but have fixed it somewhere along the way.
For those who don’t yet use ad-blockers, I recommend Ghostery and uBlock Origin. And AdBlock, Privacy Badger… I work on the policy that if one misses something, another will block it .
Interesting that you mention this - I heard recently that Google had dropped its last vague references to ‘don’t be evil’ from its staff code of conduct.
Yes I have but only for specific things I want where there is a specific FB Group for them. It is a good way to avoid fees for sellers (apart from PayPal).
I guess at least they are aligning their code with their reality - shame its not the other way around
Another interesting one is ‘HTTPS Everywhere’ from the EFF. I’ve found on occasion that the ghost and the badger knock heads, but it doesn’t seem to be a huge issue. Still, the pi-hole is my favourite, because I can force everyone else’s compliance (ir)regardless of their use of blockers … mwhahahaha
No. Facebook & all the related domains I can find are blocked on the family router. Nobody cares or noticed. Forgotten about until a guest said something odd here - can’t get facebook! Of course doesn’t stop facebook when on mobile data.
I also recommend searching via duckduckgo.com so your searches aren’t tracked, using the Vivaldi browser to limit the tracking and installing something like “Little Snitch” (on the Mac) so you can actually see what goes in and out of your network… can be quite an eye opener.
EDIT: Check out the Brave browser too… blocks everything and is fast… https://brave.com/
but then most of the time sanity feels like just a concept … (insert manic laugh here …).
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