Seller: How Facebook marketplace standalone app works

Facebook has just launched a standalone app called SELLER. The app is built for people who sell on Facebook Marketplace and the app comes with some business supporting tools including AI-powered ones. The app syncs directly with Facebook Marketplace, making existing listings, messages, and selling history carry over automatically, and anything created in the app is published back to Marketplace where buyers already shop.

Notably, a “Facebook Marketplace Seller” (not the newly launched standalone app) is an individual or business that lists products for sale on Facebook Marketplace, Meta's peer-to-peer and retail commerce platform built into the Facebook app. Believe it or not, Facebook Marketplace is celebrating its tenth birthday this year. Maybe this is why the company is launched the seller app to mark the celebration.

The Facebook Marketplace comes a long way from its early days, when buying and selling mostly happened informally inside Facebook Groups. Now it's a massive global hub where more than 430 million listings are happening every single month. For a lot of people, what started as casually offloading unused stuff has actually turned into a steady side income, or even a full time business. And now, Meta is giving those sellers their very own dedicated app to manage their listings more professionally.

The Seller app's core features

Here are the built-in features sellers gets inside the Facebook Marketplace's standalone app:

• A dedicated home dashboard: The seller app has a dedicated home dashboard that surfaces what Sellers need to navigate around the app. The home interface compromises of items to ship, buyers to respond to, and listings to reprice. You will also find the sales performance snapshot in the home screen.
• AI-assisted listing creation: The AI feature, powered by Meta AI, allows you to upload photos of your products and the Meta AI will be prompted to auto-generate the title, description, price suggestion, and category, plus a bulk listing feature for creating multiple listings at once.
• Unified seller inbox: You will also get a unified inbox and inventory management system that allow you to view, edit, relist, and track full inventory from one place. You will also get all your buyer messages organized in one place. The messages will be threaded by item so that every conversation lines up neatly with the specific listing it's about. This helps solve the problem of being left scrolling to figure out who's asking about what.

Facebook said these features aren't the last, as they'll keep updating the app based on feedback from their seller community.

How to use the Seller app

Currently, the seller app is available on Apple app store for iOS users in the US of A. The Android version is not available yet and the web version is being tested, but only for people who've already downloaded the iOS or Android app. So the web experience isn't standalone yet; it's a companion for existing app users while they work out the kinks.

Facebook is building this marketplace into a stronger competitor to eBay and other resale platforms—maybe this is why it is also framing the marketplace app as a rolling release, with more features coming based on what sellers tell them they need.