He offered the opportunity to our team and the Video team first. ![]() The good news was that Mark wanted to make space for more “jobs to be done” in the app by adding new tabs. Launching one of the first new tabs in the app was no small feat. Though we expected to launch a separate app once Marketplace became successful, you will likely notice that it never happened in the years since, because the experience was better integrated into Facebook itself. The ability to work within the Facebook ecosystem, where millions of people were already trading in communities, made this decision a no-brainer. We debated for some time and finally decided that having a tab in the largest app in the world was preferable to having a separate app. As long as we stayed within Groups, we could not address this issue. We already had both buyers and sellers, but we weren’t succeeding in making the connection between the two. Prior to this, no group content was ranked-it was purely chronological.Īlmost every two-sided marketplace struggles with bringing on enough supply and/or bringing on enough demand. We also started to rank the group content to help people discover products for sale. Some of our earliest experiments were simply structuring the groups so that items for sale showed up as listings rather than just discussion posts. Some were local mini-marketplaces (ex: Denton Buy and Sale ), some were interest groups (ex: marble collectors trading ), and some were both (ex: classic car sale groups ). We found that many more people were part of Facebook Groups communities that had been set up specifically for buying, selling, and trading than we expected. This allowed us to track organic behaviors on the platform. We decided to set up a way to allow group admins to opt into becoming classified commerce groups. One of the biggest issues early on was that there was no way to know what groups were meant for selling things (vs. Vijaye Raji, our engineering lead, immediately pulled a couple of engineers from our team, and we started testing a product we called Groups Commerce.Īt the time, commerce in groups was informal and completely organic. He had previously worked on TradeMe in New Zealand and saw what Facebook could do. One day, a rotational product manager, Bowen Pan, joined Facebook and said he wanted to work on enabling commerce within Facebook groups. This was in part because of previous failed commerce attempts, like Beacon and Oodle, but also because the idea of selling something on Facebook seemed strange to many of the employees. We tried hackathons, enlisting interns, and testing new products ( Wishlist, I’m looking at you), but we never quite built up the momentum to get it going. Unfortunately, I was terrible at selling the idea, and for five years, nothing happened. This was less common in Western markets, which made it a blind spot for many of those at the company. In fact, in many early research studies, more than half of people studied in many countries cited Facebook as a place they had bought or sold things. Social networking was not simply about sharing with friends in many places, especially in emerging markets, commerce was a core part of the “ jobs to be done ” on Facebook. It seemed inevitable that social commerce would be an important part of the company and its products. ![]() I knew I wanted to build commerce into Facebook from the moment I walked into my first interview. To learn more from Deb, definitely subscribe to her newsletter, and follow her on LinkedIn. She also sits on the board of Intuit and is the author of the soon-to-be-released book Take Back Your Power: 10 New Rules for Women at Work (I’ve already pre-ordered it and so should you ). Deb left Facebook about a year ago and is now the CEO of Ancestry. During her 11 years at Facebook/Meta, she also led teams that built Facebook Login, Facebook Pay, Facebook Commerce Manager, and dozens of other foundational Facebook products. There is no better human alive to tell this story than Deb Liu, and below, for the first time, Deb shares the story behind Facebook Marketplace.ĭeb led the team that pitched, built, launched, and scaled Facebook Marketplace from just an idea to what it is today. ![]() For years, I’ve been curious to learn what it took to make Facebook Marketplace work, when so many local marketplaces (including Facebook’s previous attempts) have failed. It’s ahead of Alibaba, Walmart, eBay, Taobao, and has quietly left the once-unconquerable Craigslist in the dust. I recently learned that Facebook Marketplace is the world’s second-largest marketplace, in terms of monthly active users, behind only Amazon.
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