Facebook Seminar Critique

As I have been allocated CafeWorld about which the presenters did not really talk, I would like to switch to MarketPlace, on which I have spent some time myself.

Marketplace, as explained by its name, is a place that a market operates, the difference from conventional marketplace is that this one is a e-market built into Facebook, meant to make full use of its enormous social network. It now has about 3.3 million users and Group 7 described it has made great success as well as provides Facebook users a convenient way of transactions. Is it really the case?

Marketplace is vitally different from other applications: it is an OFFICIAL release by Facebook. This brings tremendous advantages to Marketplace. An easy example is that Facebook has an API specifically built for Marketplace (they are deprecating it now though). This would not be possible for unofficial applications. Other than that, another obvious advantage is Facebook could advertise its own applications more than other companies. After all, it does not need to pay for the ad fees and go through any negotiations with itself. With such inherent advantages as the starting point, it would be impossible that Marketplace not having many users, even if it is really as poorly designed as Pillowfight, users would still try it as it is built by Facebook itself. So, is Marketplace really a success after all? The answer is negative.

It is true that Marketplace has over 3.3 million monthly active users, which is a big number. While Facebook as a platform has over 350 million users, so less than 1 percent active Facebook users actually play around with Marketplace. I guess this figure is quite poor given the analysis in the above paragraph. What does it say? It says that Marketplace is not successful, at least till now it has not been successful. Why?

First thing first, Facebook does not really know what it wants Marketplace to do. Is it a duplicate of ebay? Maybe, at least it looks like it. But where is the secured online payment system? Things simply doesn't work without it. Then let us assume it is a platform for physically closely spaced users, why get it so complicated that every time I look for something, I have to choose within how many miles away I want from a certain city? This just makes things worse. From another angle, what kind of goods Facebook wants to sell? Is it new items or used items? Normally people won't care about distance much if they buy new items but it becomes critical when they are buying second-hands as they are facing much higher unsatisfactory rate and quite possible will not accept the item. In this case, long distance not only increases the risk of swindle but also makes returning of unwanted items very tedious.

Secondly, as Facebook is not sure about what Marketplace should do, it now stays in a awkward situation.

On one hand, it is directly competing with famous E-commerce companies like Ebay. Facebook is likely to fail. Let's just take Ebay for example, it is the most famous e-commerce brand. According to one of its 08 quarterly report, ebay had over 80 million active users, which is highly likely to have exceeded 100 million today. Well, this is a huge difference. It seems to me there is no chance that Facebook could win. Actually Group 7 commented in their excellently awesome video ( it is really awesome :) ) that Facebook is trying to integrate a online payment platform into Marketplace. In my opinion, this helps little, for reasons that it has a too small market share and has no distinguished advantages over its competitors.

On the other hand, Marketplace is not optimizing the platform as a regional second-hand market. It does supports functions like sort out items according to users' network settings and things like that, but it is too complicated to use and not user-friendly. As commented in the 5 paragraph, people tend not to sell second-hands on big e-commerce sites like ebay. Does it mean that people are not selling second-hands? Of course not. As my observation indicates, people tend to make use of local forums to buy and sell second-hand items. The reason is apparent be cause it is simple, easy and safe. Second-hand items are actually in tremendous need because they often carry a higher value/price ratio. While it is much more difficult for people to actually find second-hand items comparing with new items. This is where business lies.

Summing up the above two paragraphs, we see that Marketplace is trying to accomplish two functions at the same time, while not successful for different reasons.

How should it improve itself? My idea is that on one hand instead of competing with big e-commerce companies like E-bay, it should seek possible chances to cooperate with them. On the other hand, Facebook should optimize its advantage of having a giant interconnected user group to occupy the world's local second-hand markets. It should simplify its UI to make it as simple and easy as possible. A desirable result is that users could spend only 3-5 mins a day to quickly look through items that he might be interested in, just like what they would do in a farming game. Real-name policy simplifies and secures transactions tremendously. In such a way, Marketplace might be able to really popularize itself and make a success.