Facebook Marketplace

Facebook Marketplace is a place with Facebook app for people to buy or sell new and used items easily—locally or from afar. What started initially as a local-first C2C platform has grown into a mixed-use experience serving multiple seller and fulfillment types.

As part of this team, I led content design efforts for the buyer side of Marketplace’s shipping feature. This work ultimately enabled the experience to find product market fit in 2020, establishing a foundation for more shipping experiences to build off of our core C2C product.

Landing Shipping

Shipping posed a few key challenges on Marketplace, but it all came down to one user problem: awareness. Given its beginnings as a local C2C marketplace, most users weren’t aware of—or expecting—the addition of shipping. And if they were aware of it, they weren’t clear on how it would mesh with their current mental model of Marketplace.

Based on research and app usage, I identified a few key areas for improvement: 1. general education and 2. prominence within consideration shopping. The below screens show how some of those features developed.

These changes—though seemingly small—went through a myriad of experiments to land the most optimal format for applying these strategies. The work here ultimately led to PMF.

Trust: a new challenge

Though PMF meant more people were becoming aware of shipping, we still had an adoption challenge. Understandably, asking buyers to trust C2C sellers to safely ship used items is a tall order—meaning some users weren’t comfortable using the product.

This established trust as one of the biggest opportunities for design to address. I led the content design work here, focusing primarily on: 1. seller trust signals and 2. purchase protection, our buyer protection policy.

For seller trust signals, we added strings indicating how experienced individual sellers were in terms of shipping, such as how many items they’ve successfully shipped.

For purchase protection, I expanded the exposure of the policy to users during the consideration process—and I made the educational content more clear, concise and scannable.

All told, these trust-based efforts led to a 1-3% increase in C2C shipped transactions.