I hate it, but it’s still the biggest social media platform of our time: Facebook. In the recent years Facebook became also more and more popular for selling stuff.
For almost a decade we had eBay Kleinanzeigen here in Germany with probably 99% market share when it comes to “online garage sales” like Craigslist in the US.
With pages and groups, Facebook also established itself in that market and recently they even added features to specify prices an other selling criteria to posts. What’s great and the worst about it?
Recently I was trying to get rid of a technical thing I built myself. It was a motorized adjustable table. The height could be adjusted using a stepper motor and a microcontroller. These tables are usually used in laser cutters and I did no longer need it. Therefore I started to think about where to sell that item most efficiently. Regular bidding platforms are too expensive and flea-market sites are too general and most visitors do not even know what a laser cutter is.
Then I thought about a group which I recently discovered in Facebook. That was a group specially for laser cutters and I thought this will be the perfect group to find someone who is interested in buying my table. I created a group post with a few pictures, a long description and a price tag and waited for reactions.
It probably took just about 15 minutes until the most annoying comment was posted. It consists of terms like “overpriced”, “bad quality” or whatever. Someone who is clearly not interested, but only want to trash talk your item. This is so rude an unnecessary!
However, usually more and more people will like and reply on such comments and discussions about my price tag and the product quality will raise.
Even though the item is custom built, people are complaining the price, even if they do not have any idea about material price and manufacturing costs. For example my table consists of aluminium profiles and I purchased them in a metal manufacturing business locally in my town – it’s professionally cut. I didn’t get a cheap profile from the hobby store and cut it myself with some saw.
People are not realizing that quality most of the time results in a higher price than ready off the shelf things. Unfortunately, they need to complain about that publicly.
It’s one of the reasons why I mostly quit Facebook! Dealing with these kind of people… I’m sick of it!
However, I got the table sold within a few hours (for my advertised price). Seems not to be overpriced for everyone fortunately.