Facebook’s New Feature “Local Market” Powered by Facebook Groups

As reported by a number of Facebook users, a new feature ‘local market’ appears in their Facebook iPhone app and even in place of the messenger button. This feature aims at creating a virtual market place for buyers and sellers to browse and post items online for marketing. It offers a variety of product categories like electrical appliances, kids books, clothing, autos, etc. This feature has not yet been distributed properly because it is only in the testing phase at preset.

Facebook users who went through it in detail, discovered that the feature consists of 2 interfaces namely ‘Buy’ and ‘Sell’. This allows people to choose from what products they wish to buy and what they want to sell. Items are presented along with pictures and prices. The post option was available to users when they posted something on the local market group. Some users reported that the ‘Local Market’ feature was available only for a short period of time, around 2 hours, but most of the unaware ones couldn’t actually go through it because it took too long to load.

The feature is said to be available when a tab on mobile is dedicated to it or a bookmark under favorites on the desktop, which will display all the items posted locally in their area. The Sell option has turned out to be more popular as it is relevant from the fact that the sale option has ended up being very crowded in this short time in a given geographical area. Some categories have ended up with a thousand items already.

These groups are an effective means for people to use Facebook groups and form communities to buy, sell, browse and search products in an online sale format.