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FB’s Marketplace in India soon, set to disrupt OLX, Quikr
Facebook will soon roll-out its Marketplace in India, a big foray into the online classified advertising and commerce business, currently dominated by the likes of Olx and Quikr.
Facebook will soon roll-out its Marketplace in India, a big foray into the online classified advertising and commerce business, currently dominated by the likes of Olx and Quikr.
“We’ll be rolling out Marketplace to additional markets in the coming months,” a Facebook spokesperson said in reply to HT’s questionnaire.
The feature is currently available in the US, the UK, Australia and New Zealand.
The online classified market in India is currently worth $1 billion (around ₹6,700 crore), and is estimated to cross ₹8,200 crore by 2020. Olx and Quikr are the dominant players. Both declined to comment for the story.
Users will be able to list items for sale, and search for what they want in the locality nearby. The social networking giant wants to change the way business is done in India, and considering its user base of more than 150 million in the country (that’s more than double the number of active online shoppers in India), the opportunities are huge. The Marketplace feature will soon appear as a “shop” icon at the bottom of the Facebook app. It will take the user to the classified page where people can choose from the vast range of “usually” used products.
Marketplace will help people shop without bouncing between apps, sell items, and reach out to other people on the same platform. A seller can list his product, chat with an interested buyer and negotiate the price. The payment will be made offline as Facebook will not provide the buyer or the seller with a payment gateway or logistics support.
The company already allows listing of articles in Facebook Group, where sellers can put up things that they want to sell within a particular group, but the reach is limited. Marketplace allows users to discover items they wish to buy with the help of location-based search.
Though India-specific numbers are not available, 450 million people bought and sold products on Groups globally every month, amounting to $15 billion of sale in 2015.
“People get tremendous value from buy and sell groups, so we’re continuing to build new features to improve the experience... Marketplace makes it easier for people to browse products,” the spokesperson said.
For Facebook’s part, the company can leverage on its knowledge of consumer behaviour to build its social commerce business in the country. “We’ve seen that many people are already coming to Facebook to discover, buy and sell products... We want to make that process easier and help more people connect to make those transactions,” the spokesperson added.
Analysts, however, don’t want to sound too optimistic just now.
According to Sanchit Vir Gogia, founder and chief analyst of Greyhound Research, Facebook’s entry can change the face of the online classified businesses, but it will face a challenge in building a large list of products from which people can choose.
