eBay Facebook App

eBay has just launched a facebook Application called eBay Marketplace .  This is hot on the heals of their eBay to go application for listing products on blogs and other websites.

This is clearly a no brainer for eBay as Facebook and other social media sites are expanding so rapidly.  The marketplace place app lets users monitor their eBay activity from their facebook account and promote their items to other facebook member. A quick look at the functionality reveals the following:

• Items are listed on your facebook profile, but not in the facebook marketplace
• Items have links to bid and buy, but these direct the user to eBay
• You can allow users to see the items you are watching, items you are selling, sold and unsold (hmmm not sure if I want to show people what I am watching….)

There has been quite a few developments in this space recently.  Buy.com‘s launched its Garage sale application, which allows items to be listed and bought through Facebook. 

Ztail report that eBay items listed on social media sites see huge increases in traffic.  From this point of view I think that eBay are missing a bit of trick not taking their product further and allowing people to bid directly the facebook site.  Unlike this eBay app, Ztail shares the affiliate income with its users.

I think that the future for this type of application is to allow eBay users to list them items in the Facebook marketplace, and to integrate the eBay checkout into facebook, allowing an integrated experience.  eBay should also expand the application to cover classified sites such as its own Gumtree, and Craigs list.