How to sell on Facebook Marketplace

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To get your small business selling on Facebook Marketplace, all you need is a Facebook account and access to your mobile or desktop – it really is that easy! For this reason, Facebook is viewed as a simple, free ecommerce solution by a lot of small businesses starting out.

What’s more, merchants can sell on Facebook Marketplace without paying any fees, which isn’t the case for other online marketplaces, such as Amazon or eBay.

To make the selling process as streamlined and stress-free as possible, you’ll want to sync Facebook Marketplace with your ecommerce store. Out of all the market-leading ecommerce products we tested, we found that BigCommerce is the easiest to integrate with Facebook, which is why it is our top recommendation for merchants wanting to sell on this platform.

To find out how to sync your ecommerce store, how to successfully sell on Facebook Marketplace, and the benefits of doing so, read on!

In this article we will cover:

What is Facebook Marketplace?
The benefits of selling on Facebook Marketplace
How does Facebook Marketplace work?
How to sell on Facebook Marketplace (successfully!)
Conclusion: is Facebook Marketplace a good sales channel for my business?

What is Facebook Marketplace?

Originally designed as a platform to share pictures of your cute dog, or to post about your first home, Facebook moved into the casual seller space by creating an online marketplace.

Similarly to eBay, users can list items that they want to sell to potential buyers in their area. Starting off as a place for any user to sell their old wares or dodgy secondhand items, sellers would post ads on the marketplace, and buyers would pop round and pay cash if they were happy with the item.

However, since its humble beginnings, Facebook Marketplace has grown considerably over the years.

Now, small online merchants use Marketplace to sell their products to Facebook’s nearly three billion monthly users. Marketplace is no longer full of old sofas and dodgy Ford Focus’ but, instead, fashion, cosmetics, and electronics are all sold on its marketplace as online retailers continue to expand their reach and cast their nets wider.

The benefits of selling on Facebook Marketplace

As a small business owner, you may question whether selling on Facebook is a viable revenue stream, considering the platform is first, and foremost, a social media playground.

But there are major benefits to selling on Mark Zuckerberg’s proverbial front lawn, including:

Zero fees – where else can you sell online and not have to pay any fees? With the likes of Amazon, even as an individual seller, you are expected to pay £0.75 per product sold. With Marketplace, you don’t have to pay a penny, meaning you can keep all of the profits!
A huge number of potential buyers – another great thing about selling on Facebook is the sheer scale of the platform. There are three billion users accessing the platform monthly and, in just one quarter of 2021, over one million users accessed Facebook’s marketplace – so you have plenty of customers to sell to.
Integration with your online store – so long as you’re using an ecommerce platform that syncs seamlessly with Facebook, such as our top choice BigCommerce, you can post products onto Facebook Marketplace with the click of a button, direct from your store. This saves you the time and effort of having to upload products to multiple marketplaces.

How does Facebook Marketplace work?

It’s all well and good knowing the benefits of selling on Facebook’s Marketplace, but how does it actually work?

Well, essentially, any Facebook user is able to list an item for sale on the platform, so long as it doesn’t fall under Facebook’s list of prohibited items. To do this, select the ‘Marketplace’ tab on Facebook.

From here, you’ll be welcomed to the marketplace (isn’t Facebook so polite?). You will then have to read and adhere to the Marketplace rules. Which are (in a nutshell):

Respect everyone
Be honest
Report anything suspicious
Buy and sell responsibly – this is the most important rule for ecommerce businesses, as listings that don’t follow Facebook’s policies will be removed

Once you’ve clicked ‘I understand’, you’ll be taken to the Marketplace homepage. From here, you can purchase items but, most importantly, list items for sale. There are two ways to do this that we cover in this guide: listing individually, or integrating your Facebook account with your existing ecommerce platform.

How to list items to sell

When using Facebook on your desktop, select ‘create new listing’ on the left-hand side of the page and select one of the three options. For most businesses, you will be creating a new listing for ‘items’.

From here, you can upload photos of your items, fill in product information, including price and item category, and add a description to attract potential customers.

You can also widen, or specifically select, the location you wish to sell your items, which is great if you want to test out how popular your products are in different regions of the UK.

You can also select additional listing options, and set your meeting preferences – which is an important step if you are running an ecommerce business.

For the most part, whether you are working with an order fulfilment service, or managing packaging and shipping yourself, you will want to set your preferences to door drop-off. If you have a physical store, then you can also enable buyers to come and collect their purchases.

However, you don’t want to set your preferences to public meetup, this looks unprofessional and could damage your brand image or, worse, discourage people from buying your products.

After you’ve filled out all the details of your listing, simply click ‘next’ and hit ‘post’. Once Facebook approves the listing after initial checks, your item will be visible on the marketplace, and you can watch the offers come flooding in!

Need to know

Be mindful that once a sale has been made, all orders must be shipped within three days and received within seven days – otherwise the buyer is entitled to a full refund.

Integrating with your ecommerce platform – the easier way to sell on Facebook Marketplace

For your average Joe, using this process to sell the odd item is easy, and far from time-consuming.

However, when it comes to online merchants and popular brands selling higher quantities of products, listing items individually can be a real pain.

This less-than-efficient process could mean you spend hours, if not days, uploading stock onto Facebook’s Marketplace, or you could use an ecommerce platform to streamline the process for you.

Some ecommerce platforms, such as BigCommerce, integrate perfectly with Facebook. This means that, so long as you build your store with providers like BigCommerce, your products will sync with Marketplace. So, every time you upload a new item and create a new product page on your site, it will automatically be listed on Facebook – with all the necessary information filled in.

BigCommerce does this so effectively that it was rated as the best ecommerce platform to sell on Facebook during our most recent round of in-depth research and user testing. Read our BigCommerce review for more information.

And it is no wonder, seeing as it is incredibly easy to sync your online store with Facebook Marketplace. Simply follow these steps:

Ensure your product inventory is up to date and accurate. Once Facebook synchronises with your store, your products will be pulled through and available on its marketplace. The last thing you want is to have a product listed that is currently out of stock, or no longer available.
From your BigCommerce store control panel, open the ‘channel manager’ tab and select the Facebook icon.

A pop-up box will appear, outlining the rules of Marketplace. It will also highlight the categories it currently supports with Big Commerce merchants, which are:
– Accessories
– Apparel (Men & Women)
– Baby & Kids
– Bags & Luggage
– Beauty (Women)
– Home Furnishings
As long as your products fall into one of these categories, click ‘yes I’m interested’ and proceed with the syncing process.
Facebook must review your request, it will check the legitimacy of your site and ensure you adhere to the commerce guidelines. This process typically takes less than a week.
Once you’ve been approved, your site is synced with Facebook, and you can watch as your products appear seamlessly in its Marketplace!

Can other ecommerce platforms sync with Facebook?

You need to be aware that, even though you can integrate BigCommerce and Facebook with just a click of a button, when it comes to other platforms, it isn’t as simple.

In fact, some ecommerce providers, including Wix and Squarespace, don’t offer Facebook integration – so that is one less channel you can sell in. Currently, Facebook’s ecommerce listing partners include:

BigCommerce – best for Facebook integration
Shopify – coming soon
ChannelAdvisor
ShipStation
Zentail

How to sell on Facebook Marketplace (successfully!)

Although listing your products on Facebook is as simple as a walk in the park, consistently making sales is another story.

Marketplace is a great place to sell your products, particularly as it is the only platform (let alone marketplace) that lets you do this without paying any fees.

But this blessing is also a curse, in that there are over 250 million active stores selling on Facebook, all of which want to take full advantage of the platform’s non-existent sellers fees.

This makes it an extremely competitive space to sell in and, to stand out among a sea of similar merchants, and sell on Facebook Marketplace successfully, you need to action the following tips:

Ensure your online store can integrate with Facebook Marketplace

As we’ve already touched on, syncing your online store, so products are automatically listed on Facebook Marketplace, is a sure-fire way to save you a lot of time and effort.

It means you are several steps ahead of your competitors, and able to create product pages on your own website while seamlessly listing them on Facebook at the same time.

Meanwhile, others will be uploading items individually, wasting resources that could be spent on other things, such as marketing and inventory management.

BigCommerce integrates well with Facebook, and is our recommended ecommerce platform in this regard!

Adhere to the rules

The last thing you want is to have listed products removed from Facebook, particularly if you have them synced from your own website. This doesn’t look great for your brand image.

Always be sure to routinely check Facebook’s Commerce Policies as they are often updated, from here you can keep tabs on prohibited items.

Choose your location wisely

One of the great things about Facebook Marketplace is that you can choose which area/region you want your products to be listed in. By conducting market research carefully, you can find that demand for your products (and the asking price) could be higher in some regions than in others.

Be aware, however, that the further the area, the more expensive shipping will be. If using one, always check with your order fulfilment service for information on estimated delivery times.

Demand estimation using eBay’s sell-through rate

According to Beatriz Repiso, CEO of Otternative Marketing, a great way to determine whether a product will sell well on Facebook Marketplace, is to identify how similar products are selling on other online marketplaces.

“Look for relevant or best-selling products on eBay and Amazon that are similar to your product, and calculate whether the sell-through rate is more than 50%. If this is the case, these are the types of products that will sell easily on your Facebook marketplace.”

Conduct Marketplace category research

Take the time to delve into Facebook’s selling categories. Keep tabs on the products similar to yours, and identify which ones are selling frequently, before determining why that may be the case.

From this market research, you can make informed decisions on what products to sell on the marketplace, and at what price.

Repiso believes this is important to any merchant’s success on Facebook. She says:

“You can learn what is going to work best for your products, by analysing the aesthetics, price, or description of other products on the Marketplace that perform well with your buyers.”

You can learn what is going to work best for your products, by analysing the aesthetics, price, or description of other products on the Marketplace that perform well with your buyers.

Conclusion: is Facebook Marketplace a good sales channel for my business?

If you are a small, online retail business selling products that fall under Facebook’s permitted items, the platform is a great place to sell your products.

There are zero seller fees, meaning you can enjoy near 100% profit margins (besides shipping/packaging costs). You also have an enormous market to sell to, as pretty much every man (and his dog) has a Facebook account these days.

What’s more, if you are running your online store with an ecommerce platform like BigCommerce, you can seamlessly upload your products onto the Marketplace with the click of a button. This helps you drive sales and increases brand awareness in the process.

If you are in the early stages of setting up your online retail empire, check out our in-depth guide on how to start an ecommerce business.

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