Part yard sale, part flea market, part online store, marketplaces like Craigslist and Facebook Marketplace are either treasure troves of unique finds or the internet’s junk drawer. For many buyers, not knowing what they’ll find is part of the fun—and it’s easier than ever for sellers to capitalize on that appeal.
The “right” online marketplace for you, though, depends on whether you’re looking to offload some stuff and make some extra money, or are looking to develop an audience for your ecommerce business by selling locally and abroad.
Here’s what to know about Facebook Marketplace and Craigslist, two of the major players in the local sales and resale space.
What is Facebook Marketplace?
Facebook Marketplace is a selling platform that launched in 2016 as a way for Facebook users to buy and sell used goods to one another. Although it started out offering local pickup only, the platform’s addition of shipping features (plus factors like global supply chain interruptions during the pandemic) helped transform Facebook Marketplace into an ecommerce platform for small business owners, artisans, and side-hustling hobbyists.
Facebook Messenger makes it easy to have conversations and complete Marketplace transactions, while an AI-powered algorithm surfaces personalized listings. As a result, Marketplace has become a strong player in the resale space—with a reported 1.2 billion users in 2025, 40% of Facebook’s total monthly active users.
What is Craigslist?
Craigslist, founded by the eponymous Craig Newmark, is an online platform that originally launched in 1995 as an email distribution list curating events in the San Francisco Bay Area. It quickly expanded into a hub for classified listings, job postings, and personal ads. Despite recent competition from a variety of sites, including Facebook Marketplace, Mercari, and OfferUp, it is still a top classified site in both traffic and revenue.
The old-school look and feel of Craigslist has famously remained mostly unchanged since its inception, though it did launch an app in 2019. The site says its spare design and ad-free browsing experience are an attempt to restore the “human voice to the Internet, in a humane, non-commercial environment,” with an emphasis on hosting a “collection of communities with similar spirit, not a single monolithic entity.”
Craigslist vs. Facebook Marketplace: How do they compare?
Ultimately, both Craigslist and Facebook Marketplace are online selling sites powered by in-person, peer-to-peer transactions. Here’s how the platforms differ in their logistics:
Shipping options
Craigslist does not offer shipping or delivery services, but instead leaves the buyer and seller to work out the pick-up or fulfillment.
While Facebook Marketplace started out as a neighborhood-centric marketplace to sell items locally, the addition of shipping features has opened up the possibility of nationwide selling. If you want to sell outside of your local community or if your business relies on dropshipping, Facebook Marketplace is going to be a better option.
You’ll have to pay a selling fee, so you may want to price your products accordingly. However, not all items are eligible for in-app shipping. Sellers either choose to offer “free shipping” on their listings (and include the cost in the price) or allow the buyer to pay for shipping.
Reach
While millions of people visit both platforms each month, their overall reach differs in a few ways: Facebook uses AI-powered curation to personalize buyer feeds on Marketplace, impacting when and where your listing may appear. This also increases the likelihood that best-fit buyers are likely to come across listings. There are also many opportunities to post to a specific interest group or location, and Marketplace allows you to select relevant groups as part of the listing process.
By contrast, sellers on Craigslist must repost their listings frequently to ensure they appear at the top of results. Well-worded descriptions and high-quality images can also help your listing stand out.
Fees
It is free to list on both Craigslist and Facebook Marketplace, but Craigslist charges a small posting fee for job postings, services or gig listings, and real estate listings. Marketplace charges a selling fee for transactions completed and shipped through the platform, but not for cash transactions.
Promotional tools
Craigslist does not offer promotional tools to sellers. Facebook Marketplace has various promotional methods, including Boosted Listings, which allows sellers to run their own ad campaigns. Users can pay for listings to appear in dedicated slots across feed, category, and product detail pages for a set amount of time.
Advantages and disadvantages of Craigslist
Craigslist has been a legacy player for so long it’s hard to imagine a world without it. Here are a few of the benefits and drawbacks of using the platform.
Advantages of selling on Craigslist
Free and easy to use
Unless you’re posting about a job opening or real estate, Craigslist is free to use. Because it is, at its core, a classifieds hub, it is simple to use and to navigate, though posting can become time-consuming, especially if you need to re-post items multiple times to get traction.
Anonymity
The anonymous nature of Craigslist requires extra caution when planning to meet with buyers or sellers. That same anonymity may be a benefit to those who wish to steer clear of social media, or want to get rid of specific items without needing to create or manage an account.
Set prices
While many other online marketplaces, like Facebook Marketplace, eBay, and Mercari, allow buyers to send “best offers” or negotiate prices auction-style, Craigslist uses a fixed price model. While individual buyers and sellers may choose to negotiate over email, text, or in-person, pricing flexibility is not a part of the browsing experience, allowing sellers to stick by their desired prices.
Disadvantages of selling on Craigslist
Safety
Some may feel it’s too easy to do business on Craigslist, with minimal verification or security woven into interactions between sellers and buyers. Craigslist does obscure the physical address and personal contact information of a listing’s owner, but negotiations and coordination happen off-site, either over email or text.
High density
Craigslist is known to be a bit of a hodgepodge of hyperlinks: a charming morass of everything from appliances to random stacks of wood, kids toys, and pet tarantulas. It does filter listings into categories, and it offers advanced filtering to narrow down by ZIP code, but listings can feel random or widely dispersed, making it easy for postings to get lost.
No targeting
Craigslist does not rely on algorithms to surface listings to relevant audiences or potential customers, which puts your posts at the mercy of the existing volume and competing listings. While you can reach buyers looking in a particular ZIP code or category, there are no promotional tools that ensure you rank high in platform search. To remain visible over the long term, sellers must repost their individual listings.
Advantages and disadvantages of Facebook Marketplace
Since its launch—and after the supply chain disruptions of the pandemic that contributed to an explosion of ecommerce buying and selling—Facebook Marketplace has become an easy way to source second-hand or artisan goods. Here are a few of its advantages and disadvantages in the competitive landscape.
Advantages of selling on Facebook Marketplace
Built-in audience
Much of Marketplace’s rapid growth can be attributed to Facebook’s existing user base and the app’s seamless integration with the greater platform. As a seller, this means a more consistent, actively engaged audience of potential buyers who regularly peruse the app—especially thrifty Gen Z shoppers, who say it’s the only reason they keep their accounts active.
Mobile-optimized
One of Marketplace’s greatest advantages is the ease with which sellers can list items for sale and complete transactions. According to a 2022 report by Statista, mobile devices account for 98% of all Facebook Marketplace traffic. Listings can be created in minutes, which is a major advantage when cleaning out a closet, for example, or preparing for a move.
To list an item, sellers take a photo from within the app and give it a name. The app analyzes this information to suggest the best categorization, before sellers note the condition of the item and any additional information. Marketplace, similar to other platforms like Mercari, will suggest a price based on similar listings.
Personalized feed
Marketplace uses browsing activity to customize what users see on the platform. These curated feeds can help you find your target audiences faster rather than waiting for them to find you in a dense forest of unrelated listings.
Disadvantages of selling on Facebook Marketplace
Fees
For sellers looking to make sales outside their immediate communities, Facebook’s selling fees, which kick in when the platform facilitates shipping, can be a disadvantage of relying on the platform. As of 2024, the selling fee increased from 5% to 10%.
Setting up a Facebook shop is an alternate way to sell on Facebook. Shopify merchants who connect their stores to Facebook Shops will pay only the same transaction fees that they’d pay on sales made directly on their Shopify website.
Limited protection
Like any social media platform, Facebook Marketplace comes with its fair share of bots and scammers. While this isn’t unique to Marketplace, it does mean using common sense and staying on the lookout for suspicious posts or replies when conducting business on the platform. Facebook does provide best practices around buying and selling on Marketplace, but ultimately doesn’t vet products, buyers, or sellers beyond verifying their accounts.
Personalized feed
While this might be a benefit in some scenarios, Facebook’s discovery algorithm could also limit the audience for your listing. Anyone can browse Craigslist for anything at any time—and that’s how serendipitous connections between buyers and sellers can happen. If someone’s activity on Facebook doesn’t reflect their interest in pinball paraphernalia, they might not come across your listing.
Craigslist vs. Facebook Marketplace FAQ
Is it better to sell things on Craigslist or Facebook Marketplace?
In general, Facebook Marketplace is considered to have a wider reach and larger built-in user base than Craigslist, increasing the odds that your items for sale will find an audience. Marketplace’s Facebook Messenger integration and account verification means you can safely communicate and complete transactions with buyers.
What are the disadvantages of Facebook Marketplace?
Disadvantages of FB Marketplace include the selling fee (10% of the sales price, but only if shipping is required), limited protection for certain kinds of transactions, and the prevalence of scammers and spam that social media platforms attract—though this is a feature of all online marketplaces.
What online marketplaces can I sell products on?
There’s no shortage of online platforms for sellers of used and artisan goods. After decades of Craigslist dominance, newer platforms like Facebook Marketplace, Amazon Marketplace, OfferUp, and Mercari are increasingly popular, alongside fashion-focused resale sites like ThredUp, The RealReal, and Poshmark.
