Facebook Marketplace: How a single button and textbox ruins the service
https://i.imgur.com/KhEEVfd.png
If you've ever sold anything on FBM you have invariably experienced the maddening assault of "Is this still available?" messages.
I had one item on there that received over 700 views and, I kid you not, over 200 "Is this still available?" messages, with nearly 100% of them ghosting me after a quick "Yes" reply.
In one case the guy said "Sorry, my kid was using my phone".
Why is this happening?
Well, while FB's intent is to make it easier for users to inquire about an item being sold, the fact that the "Send" button instantly fires-off a message creates a nightmare for sellers. If you check discussion boards, this is probably one of the biggest complaints.
The UX problems comes from a lack of understanding of how people use the service. People like to fill time browsing through stuff on various services. This includes FBM. Sometimes they will click on an item that might be interesting just to see more pictures, understand what it is (descriptions can be really bad sometimes), etc. To be frank, I would not be surprised if a lot of people are bored and scroll through stuff out of habit.
The issue is that a simple unintended touch of the "Send" button launches an unwanted interaction that wastes the seller's time. The person browsing was never really interested in the item and has no intention of engaging at all.
How to fix it?
Simple: Make them type the message. The "Send" button should be disabled until they type a non-trivial message (greater than N words or use AI to check that they are not just saying "blah blah blah"). And, when they do click "Send", ask for confirmation.
At one point I had over 50 listings (we were emptying out a storage unit). The experience was what I would characterize as a dumpster fire event. It was an utter waste of time. The vast majority of "Is this still available?" messages --HUNDREDS OF THEM-- resulted in ghosting, no interaction at all. My conclusion was that having a local garage sale would be far more effective and real. We did. It was. Amazing how many people showed-up to check out computers, drive arrays, collectible cameras and a bunch of technical stuff. The rest will go on eBay and Craigslist (which might not be what it used to be these days, don't know).
I just add something like this to every listing:
And then I ignore all those other messages.There are a million ways to improve this pile of garbage called Facebook marketplace.
But make no mistake, they don't care about your experience in the slightest.
The textbox and the button were always there to drive user engagement. Number go up!
Yet, that isn't engagement at all.
Here's a likely bad parallel (well, maybe not so).
The "safety" on a Glock pistol is a little lever on the trigger itself. You squeeze and it unlocks, squeeze some more and it fires. In other words, it has no safety. A five year old can accidentally fire a Glock. On a normal firearm it's a little lever on the side that you have to rotate. Without that, the trigger does nothing.
This idea that users are "engaging" on FBM is just as fake as Glock saying they have a safety.
Weird parallel, I know. It's what came to mind because that's one of my all-time favorite stupid designs to point out.
But it is engagement to their product managers, and in turn, stakeholders.
Not genuine engagement, mind you, but measurable nonetheless.
I'm not American, but curious how many people use FB marketplace there? It's a joke here, people still prefer to use the local equivalent of Craigslist. There's plenty of other startups that are more useful. Our housing WhatsApp has a marketplace channel too which works very well; often it's just easier to buy something from someone right behind the house.
I'm in eastern Canada, and unfortunately, FBM has completely overtaken the previous leader for online classifieds, which was kijiji (owned by ebay). So if you want to to buy/sell used goods, FBM is pretty much your only option around here.
in Argentina some people call facebook marketplace the "deep web", not sure if it has that reputation in other countries. Lots of stolen things being sold and also scams
Likely true.
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I think they wanted to solve a different problem with this, to make sellers delete the ad after the item is sold.
I want to see a marketplace that makes it non-free to send a message to the seller and non-free to ghost a buyer.
The other infuriating thing is that the search filters appear to be deliberately non-functional and interpreted as mere suggestions. Distance, price and listing date, for example. Try filtering for new listings in the past week and you will get plenty of old stuff.