Summary: Facebook is making a major e-commerce push. The company on Monday announced the launch of "Facebook Marketplace," a new, prominent feature that allows individual users to easily buy and sell a range of items, such as clothing electronics, household goods, furniture, jewelry, art and cars. Marketplace is coming out to users over the age of 18 in the U.S., U.K., Australia and New Zealand on iOS and Android over the next few days. Facebook plans to extend the service to its desktop site and additional countries over the next months. Facebook's 1.7-billion person user base and the new feature’s, give it a good shot of competing with more established, online marketplaces such as eBay and Craigslist. Marketplace is only built for individual users, not a store front for companies. In early tests of Marketplace, Facebook found that most users started browsing without having a specific item in mind. As a result, the company wanted to make browsing highly visual. Testing also indicated that users who were most interested in buying items on Marketplace also wanted to sell items, which encouraged the company to make both buying and selling simple. Marketplace currently prioritizes local purchases. When users open the app, they will first see for-sale items posted by people nearby. The company said illegal goods will be monitored through a combination of user flagging and Facebook's own automated systems.
Connection: In lesson 1 unit 4 Marketing was the predominate theme. In the article Facebook used primary data to find out what Facebook users would need best on the app to suit their needs. Primary data is observed or collected by a business and relates specifically to its needs or problems. Facebook observed its user to see what they needed / wanted in the app. They used this research to help the development of their app. They took consumer reaction into account and what they were looking for most. In the next lesson we talked about E-commerce. Facebook who is already an E-commerce business expanded it even more offering another service which competes with other major online marketplaces such as eBay. This app is already going to 3 countries and will extend to more countries soon. (INTERNATIONAL BUSINESS)