Western classifieds don’t know the secret to Asian marketplace success

Golden Gate Ventures is an investor in Carousell.

When Facebook’s Marketplace launched for the second time in October this year, it was billed as a modern response to old-school P2P ecommerce sites like Craigslist and eBay. But the platform missed one very important piece: user reviews. Because of this, security experts warned users against it. Without ratings, it was far too easy for dubious characters to post photos of fake or stolen goods and arrange dangerous meet-ups.

Marketplace should have looked overseas for inspiration before launching — namely, to Singapore’s mobile-first marketplace app Carousell.

The two have much in common — filtering by location, an easy snap-and-sell interface, and an in-app messaging feature for negotiating deals — but Carousell allows both buyers and sellers to leave feedback post-transaction. Since trust is one of ecommerce’s main stumbling blocks, the fact that Marketplace ignored this basic feature is pretty shocking.

Given the incredible boom of ecommerce in Asia, Western apps and sites would do well to model themselves after their Asian brethren, who are coming at this market from a “mobile first” mentality. This helps them stay flexible, appeal to young shoppers, and close plenty of sales.

Old-school marketplaces are starting to feel like too much work

A quick look at some of Asia’s more established P2P ecommerce apps makes sites like Craigslist, eBay, and Britain’s Gumtree look downright Internet 1.0. This new generation of apps has solved — or is trying to solve — many of the issues that plagued past marketplaces: time-consuming posting, unwieldy messaging options, a serious lack of mobile flexibility, and unappealing interfaces.

For both buyer and seller, the sheer ease of use in these mobile-first marketplaces is a serious game changer.

While there is something comforting about Craigslist’s incredibly old-school look, the fact that they don’t have their own mobile app shows just how unconcerned they are with innovation.

There’s also the issue of legwork. Selling something on Craigslist or eBay isn’t technically difficult, but it’s a bit time-consuming. You have to click your way through several pages as you upload photos, insert a paragraph of text, and struggle to locate the correct keywords.

But for Asia’s new generation of peer-to-peer shopping apps, the process of uploading an item is practically as simple as taking a selfie. Since they’re all mobile-first, the hassle of taking photos, transferring them to your desktop, and then uploading them to the ecommerce site is completely eliminated.

If you’re a buyer, the hyperlocal nature of the app makes things super convenient; you can browse listings in your own neighborhood or wherever you are at the time. In short, for both buyer and seller, the sheer ease of use in these mobile-first marketplaces is a serious game changer.

The yard sale of the future is totally mobile

Asia, as most know by now, is quickly becoming the smartphone capital of the world. The continent contains the globe’s two largest smartphone markets (China and India), over a billion smartphone users, and six of the world’s top 10 mobile-shopping countries. It should come as no surprise that ecommerce here is highly nimble and mobile.

New Western marketplaces are following Asia’s lead, clearly inspired by the mobile shopping revolution. Letgo, based out of Barcelona and New York, merged with mobile classifieds app Wallapop earlier this year and is now on track to hit US$13.2 billion in gross merchandise value by the end of this year.

Asia’s real P2P ecommerce secret? People want to chat