Many of us only open Meta’s original social media app to browse listings on Facebook Marketplace. Now sellers have a new standalone app to help them manage their listings, Meta announced Friday.
The app is called Seller and is now available for download on iOS and Android. You don’t need to download the app to sell items on Facebook, but it’s designed to give you better ways to manage your listings and interact with buyers.
You will have all your Marketplace history in the Seller application once connected with your Facebook account. On the home page, you get an overview of all your activity and reminders about the tasks you need to complete to complete sales. There is a dedicated data insights tab, which would be useful for people trying to turn their reselling hobby into a real business. The Messages Inbox would likely help separate your conversations with potential buyers from chats with friends and family in Messenger.
Facebook’s main strengths in the TikTok era have been the Marketplace and Groups. Both of these features kept people coming back to the app even if they relied on other apps for their social media. But it’s not just Marketplace that’s diversifying; Meta is experimenting with a groups-only app called Forum, and Facebook Creator Studio is also getting an overhaul.
The reason behind these new applications is the same reason any tech company does anything these days: artificial intelligence.
“At the foundation of our new applications is the belief that we can leverage AI to remove friction and empower the people who make things happen at Facebook,” wrote Tom Alison, head of Facebook, in a blog post. Don’t want to write ads? Have the AI do it. Can’t find an old post in your community group? Do an AI search. You get the idea.
But when you use Marketplace in the Facebook app, you can easily view a person’s profile before interacting with them — an important security check that sellers and buyers do to avoid getting scammed. Meta’s solution is to introduce verification checkmarks everywhere on Facebook.
If you want a verification mark, you can upload a selfie of yourself. If it matches your profile picture, you’re probably good to go. All of this indicates that a real person, not an AI bot, is behind an account. You can get scammed just as easily by a real person as you can by a bot, so keep an eye out for other red flags when buying and selling.
While the new Marketplace app may be attractive to powerful sellers, Meta made a curious decision to siphon its most popular features into separate apps. Perhaps in an attempt to prevent the flood of people who won’t return to Facebook if Marketplace and Groups are removed, the company is introducing a new format that allows videos to play as soon as you open the app, like TikTok. It could happen in the United States next year.
Katelyn Chedraoui
Journalist 2
Katelyn is a journalist at CNET covering artificial intelligence, including chatbots and image and video generators. His work explores how new AI technologies are infiltrating our lives, shaping the content we consume on social media, and affecting the people behind the screens. She graduated from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill with a degree in media and journalism. You can reach her at kchedraoui@cnet.com. See full bio
