Buy.com Facebook War on eBay: Who Needs Facebook Marketplace?
Buy.com announces a three-way with Facebook and eBay, aiming to usurp eBay personal selling leadership.
Dubbed “Garage Sale,” Buy.com heralds it is “putting Internet selling power in the hands of consumers” via ecommerce capability embedded within personal profile pages on social networking sites.”
First up, Facebook.:
For the first time ever, goods can be bought directly on the profile page, and purchasers never have to leave the page to complete the purchase transaction. With Garage Sale, consumers no longer need to pay listing charges associated with online auction sites, and they can take advantage of significantly lower individual transaction fees.
The Garage Sale capability is currently available to Facebook users, and Buy.com plans to roll out the service to users on other online social networks shortly. Facebook users simply add the Garage Sale feature from Facebook’s application suite and upload product information and photos to begin selling on their personal profile pages using Garage Sale’s secure transaction capability.
Buy.Com CEO Neel Grover on the opportunity: “We see tremendous growth opportunities in providing the millions of users on business and social networks with an alternative to eBay, and the ability to transform their personal profile pages beyond information-sharing.”
In good Web 2.0 coopetition fashion, Buy.com needs eBay to compete with it, though: Widely used eBay’s PayPal will help power payment processing.
Facebook has some big, bad coopetition issues of its own, with the arrival of Garage Sale on Facebooker profiles. The Buy.com personal selling meets social networking venture is but the latest individual commercial option available within Facebook, following a recent string of conflicting Facebook social selling initiatives including Oodle Classifieds Group on Facebook and Facebook’s own “Facebook Marketplace.”
Upon the launch of “Facebook Marketplace,” I underscored that by not committing to a single, unified personal selling offering, Facebook not only dilutes its own position in the marketplace, it fragments Facebook users’ commercial demand.
The “Facebook Marketplace,” according to Facebook:
Make it easy for people who share real-life connections to discover listings and sell items among friends and within their networks. Marketplace is about individuals selling or seeking items within Facebook networks.
The Facebook embedded Buy.com “Garage Sale,” according to Gene Alvarez, Gartner:
Anyone who has ever asked a friend if they knew someone who would buy their stuff understands the power of that sales model. when you add the Internet’s community, collaboration and sales capabilities, we will see yet another transformation of e-commerce and the dawn of online social selling.
Mark Zuckerberg dismissed any need to directly monetize “Facebook Marketplace” when it launched; He also dismissed any need for Facebook to share in any monetization achieved by third-party applications in Facebook, when the F8 platform launched.
Facebook is apparently succeeding in NOT making money off of Facebooker selling via Facebook; Buy.com will pocket a 5% sales commission, though.
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