eBay charges taxes and takes a cut of the sale price. They report your income to the IRS too. Facebook marketplace allows people to meet up and exchange things for cash. No fees. No taxes. And it’s much harder to scam someone in person.
Seemingly, craigslist should allow for this as well. Unfortunately for craigslist, however, it has been societally labeled as “for the olds”
The Facebook marketplace scam is two fold:
On the buyer side: Facebook does allow shipping and they have none of the (admittedly poor) seller protections that eBay has, so buyers will use hacked cashapp/venmo/paypal accounts, to “buy” something only for the money to be clawed back a few days later once the item has already shipped.
On the seller side you have sellers that charge a deposit upfront to “reserve” the item but then ghost you, and bec the transaction is happening outside of Facebook the buyer has no recourse, you can try to get facebook to delete the account but it’s super easy to create a new one.
As long as people are aware of these scams and just ignore them they can have a fairly good experience.
Though I have found fbm buyers try to negotiate a lot more no matter how cheap you make the item. You’re honestly better off setting a high price and letting ppl try to negotiate you down to what you’re comfortable selling at bec everyone wants a “deal”. This means that there needs to be room for that in the price. So some things just are hard to sell if the new cost is fairly low already.
"No, I'm not going to accept 1% of what I listed. I'm going to put it in the garbage instead since my time is now worth more. In fact, I've now had enough of you assholes call and lowball me that I'm now net negative even at what I listed so into the trash it goes."
Presumably, Facebook Marketplace simply hasn't gone through the degradation cycle, yet.
Seemingly, craigslist should allow for this as well. Unfortunately for craigslist, however, it has been societally labeled as “for the olds”