Facebook has launched Marketplace, a portal represented by the shop button on its app, where users can discover, buy and sell items within their communities. Marketplace is available in the US, UK, Australia, and New Zealand on iOS and Android, with plans to roll out to desktop and other countries in the coming months. Facebook claims that 450 million users check out buy and sell Facebook Groups monthly, which led it to launch Marketplace. Users can filter by location, category and price and browse through categories. They can also look within their city as well as in other geo locations. To see the listing, one can tap on the image to know more details, and even save it. Users can also send messages to sellers making offers, where users can see information such as how long they’d typically take to reply, a feature also present on its Facebook Pages product. Facebook will not provide a payment gateway or deliver any items. Note that sale posts can be made to the Marketplace as well as a Facebook group at the same time. The company does not say if it will eventually phase buy and sell Groups out to Marketplace, given both solve the same purpose, but we imagine that it might segregate buy and sell groups from general discussion based ones. Note that just last month, Facebook launched Groups Discover, a platform where users could browse groups by category and get recommendations based on friends, location and interests. Facebook is not new…
