Facebook Marketplace intelligent lowballs

Facebook Marketplace is a wild product. It started out as a relatively small surface area within Facebook but is increasingly becoming a meaningful competitor to Craigslist (because the UI looks less scary and is directly tied to your social graph).

I’ve used this product multiple times, as has my wife. The annoying part of facilitating offline transactions is when people try to lowball you, either when making the initial offer or when they don’t bring enough cash to the deal. It’s the worst.

This got me thinking about how one could more aggressively incentivize discounts in the shopping experience. What if there were a way to show how “desperate” sellers were based on their activity in other parts of the Facebook product? I can imagine an experience where Messenger activity is used to compile an overall sentiment on how badly the seller needs the money.

This is a massive invasion of privacy and only benefits the end buyer. However, it’s so harmful to the seller that I doubt something like this could ever make it into production. Deal hunters would love something like this if it did.

Have a friend who loves Facebook Marketplace? Send them this newsletter. https://sorens.beehiiv.com/