Why do Facebook Marketplace exist? What are its goals?

Clarification Questions (assumptions since this is a write-up):

• Meta/FB marketplace is a 2-way marketpace place to buy and sell physical goods (2-way marketplace).
• Final transaction is happening offline. So in that sense FB Marketplace is very similar to craigslist
• FB does not know when the actual transaction is completed. The actual transaction could have happened on entirely another portal. FB just sees that the seller has removed the post.
• FB Marketplace is a mature product

Here's my framework towards answering this question:

• Identify the business goal
• Identify key users
• Map the user journey
• Set metrics for each stage
• Identify a North Star metric

Mission Alignment:

FB marketplace does fits into the Meta mission of bringing people together as a community and in this case for a trade. Since this is a mature product the goal is to bring people back to the platform. Marketplace creates engagement between the seller and the buyers. Sellers (car dealers - hello?) are high engagement users and keeps bringing more people to the platform. The idea is to get the buyer and the seller together in the same place at the same time.

Seller:

Conversion rate: 

• # of sellers / # of sellers-attempting-to-create-a-selling-post. Since this is a 2-sided marketplace we have to make sure that we have sellers able to do their job
• Ensure we have sufficient inventory and sellers so that buyers will be coming back
  • # of items for sale
  • # of sellers. Making sure we have good inventory

Buyer

• # of viewers / # of items for sale. We want to make sure users are coming to the platform to view the marketplace.
• # of inquiries / # of items for sale. We want to make sure buyers are engaging. We will categorize  this in HML bucket. 
• # of items with lot of inquiries: Work with data-science to categories inquiries into high-medium-low bucket. 

• # of inquiries / # of items for sale would be the north star metric. This metric ensures that users are actively engaging. This engagement will keep bringing users back to the platform. 

• We want to understand why certain items are driving a lot of inquiries. I would deep dive into # of items with lot of inquiries. Does the item have lot of pictures, detailed description, etc? We want to encourage similar behavior to increase engagement across the board. We want to increase the number of items that have high inquiries.
• # of sellers / # of sellers-attempting-to-create-a-selling-post - We will have this to make sure that sellers are able to create posts
• # of items for sale and # of viewers - Ensure these are not trending in wrong direction.