About
Marketplace had no dedicated support for people buying and selling vehicles. This meant that people were listing their vehicles as a generic item. Marketplace wasn’t optimized to support these types of generic vehicle listings, making them hard to find and hard for people to engage with.
Vehicles that were listed into the generic category came off as spammy to buyers. Sellers had to list the vehicle details in plain text within the listing description. Important information like fair market pricing and vehicle history were often omitted from the listing.
Our research team found that people had been listing vehicles for sale on Marketplace organically, which resulted in the following problems:
Develop a shippable MVP baseline experience for the Vehicles category. This meant supporting a minimal feature-set that could be built, tested, and shipped in 6 months.
The new vehicle category must become a trusted place for people to buy and sell vehicles in their local community within 12 months.
We must reach product-market fit in a single region within 12 months for both buyers and sellers before growing to other regions.
The new vehicle category must achieve these goals to be considered successful:
Our research team helped us define the minimal feature-set we needed to launch the MVP Vehicles category for cars and trucks. People could list their vehicle on Marketplace, share their listing publicly, and be contacted by buyers through Messenger. For people looking to buy a vehicle, they could browse Marketplace, view vehicle listings, and contact sellers.
The first trust barrier we encountered was a lack of vehicle inventory. People didn’t trust Marketplace as a reputable place to purchase vehicles because we simply didn’t have robust inventory. To combat this issue, we worked with dealerships to list their vehicles on Marketplace. This boosted our vehicle inventory while also increasing people’s trust in the new category.
To continue building trust in the new vehicle category on Marketplace, we partnered with Kelley Blue Book. We integrated their Fair Market Pricing calculator into the category as well as used their vehicle data to automatically populate vehicle details into the seller’s listing. This integration gave buyers a better understanding of the vehicle condition, features, and pricing.
Vehicle history became another major trust barrier for the Vehicles category on Marketplace. People didn’t trust sellers to accurately provide vehicle history and expected a third party to verify vehicle history for them. We partnered with Carfax to include vehicle history reports as part of all dealership listings. This ensured buyers knew the history of the vehicle before contacting the seller and further increased the trust in Marketplace.
When researching the purchase of a vehicle, people often struggled to understand the cost of owning the vehicle if it were financed. This became an issue when the buyer arrived at the dealership and the cost of the vehicle was more than they were expecting. We created a tool to help people understand the monthly cost of owning the vehicle and found that people were less likely to experience frustration when speaking with a dealer after using the calculator.
Marketplace recently reached more than one billion monthly active users, and vehicles are its largest category in the US, Canada, and the UK.
Because of the success of the Vehicles category, it has expanded to include motorcycles, boats, RVs, ATVs, and more.
The vehicle category has spawned multiple Facebook ad products from its launch.