Indian online seller’s Olx and Quikr are agitating over the Facebook testing its ground

New Delhi: Facebook Inc., 2billion monthly active users is testing ‘Market place ‘to make its entry into India’s booming e-commerce industry, features for India where users can “buy and sell items with people in their community.

Indian e-commerce industry predicted to reach $200 billion by 2026, where OLX and Quikr are the platform which allows users to buy and sell items in their communities. As Facebook has confirmed that it has begun testing Marketplace in Mumbai before wider roll out in the country. However Facebook had launched Market place in 2016, while in a blog post company draw the attention that trend of buying and  selling items within Facebook  Groups had grown significantly, Mary Ku director of product management said ” more than 450million people visit buy and sell groups each month- from families in a local neighborhood to collectors around the world’.

“To make it easier for people to discover, buy, and sell locally, we are testing Marketplace, a single destination to buy and sell goods and services on Facebook. People in Mumbai can visit Marketplace by tapping on the Marketplace icon inside the Facebook app” said by the company spoke person. However sale and purchase of gadgets, furniture, vehicles and even real estate have been happening on Facebook groups in India as well, the company now plans to pack up all such posts and groups under common tabs on the app.  While given fact that Facebook’s unparalleled reach and legendary stickiness, it might seem that the social network is likely to taste runway success. After all Facebook is an inseparable part of the lives of millennial, who account for a chunk of the social network’s core user group? Besides Facebook has high popularity of some groups, such as that one that help people find accommodation, like indicator cracking social commerce will be child’s play for the Menlo Park, California-headquarter company.

According to reports Market place is essentially a dashboard where users can list items for sale with products description, photos and location, just like any other market place. Users can also look up items, custom search through filters such Household, electronics and so on with built in locations tool to find the items in nearby location while interested one can also send a direct message to the seller.

Important note to be taken that Facebook does not facilitate the payments or delivery of items in Marketplace.

Competition to be faced while establishing allover India will be very heat up seeing, as per reports by Google India and KPMG released in 2016, India’s digital classified industry is estimated to become a $1.2 billion market by 2020. Already Flip kart and Amazon dominate the traditional (business- to- customer) e- commerce segment, while OLX , Quikr, Just dial and Sulekha being online classified segment (customer –to –customer ) which currently rule market of 200 million users in India, certainly Facebook enjoys a big edge over the competition. Though Facebook Marketplace can see fast user in the country like India but Facebook need to consider that user base alone cannot drive the vertical in a long run. Basic problems usually faced by online user  in India is winnings user’s trust where it comes to selling buying online products  while it would also be left to see how Quikr and OLX respond to Facebook’s’ new Market Place.