Many of us only open the first Meta social media app to browse listings on Facebook Marketplace. Now, sellers are getting a new standalone app to help manage their listings, Meta announced Friday.
The app is called Merchant, and it’s available now to download on iOS and Android. You don’t have to download the app to sell on Facebook, but it’s designed to give you better ways to manage your listings and connect with buyers.
You’ll have all of your Marketplace history in the Merchant app once you’re signed in with your Facebook account. On the home page, you get an overview of all your work and reminders about the tasks you need to do to complete the sale. There is a dedicated database tab, which can be helpful for people trying to turn their resale business into a real business. A message inbox can help keep your conversations with potential buyers separate from conversations with your friends and family on Messenger.
Facebook’s main strengths in the TikTok era have been Marketing and Groups. These two features kept people coming back to the app as they relied on other social media apps. But it is not only the Market that works; Meta is testing a groups-only app called Forum, and Facebook Creator Studio is also in the works.
The reason behind these new apps is the same reason any tech company does anything these days: artificial intelligence.
“Underlying our new apps is the belief that we can use AI to remove friction and empower the people who make things happen on Facebook,” wrote Tom Alison, head of Facebook, in a blog post. Don’t want to write a list? Let the AI do it. Not finding old posts in your community group? Perform an AI search. You get the idea.
But when you use Marketplace in the Facebook app, you can easily check a person’s profile before contacting them – an important security check for sellers and buyers to avoid fraud. Meta’s solution to this is to introduce validation checks everywhere on Facebook.
If you want a verification token, you can upload a selfie. If it matches your profile picture, you’re probably good to go. All this does is show that a real person, not an AI bot, is behind the account. You can be fooled just as easily by a real person as by a bot, so always be on the lookout for other red flags when buying and selling.
While the new Marketplace app would be great for power sellers, it’s an interesting move by Meta to move its most popular features into separate apps. Perhaps in an effort to stem the flood of people who won’t return to Facebook if Markets and Groups are removed, the company is introducing a new format with videos that play as soon as you open the app – just like TikTok. This may come to the US next year.
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