This is just a quick post on making selling things on Facebook marketplace a little bit more palatable. I’ve seen a bunch of social posts over the last couple of weeks where people have been getting frustrated with people basically wasting their time, and fair enough too. Unfortunately this is an annoying by-product of selling on this platform. It is definitely more of a buyers paradise compared against eBay and others. Indeed, whilst researching negotiating bots while writing this post I noted that: “Facebook Marketplace Waste Of Time” featured prominently in Google search queries.

As a seller, most of the time these messages will be coming to you on your phone, and because of this you want to be able to quickly respond and get back to whatever you’re doing. Time really is money, baby.

One way to improve your efficiency and decrease the amount of time typing replies is to automate some of them by taking advantage of keyboard shortcuts on your phone.

See my recent real life recent example below where a potential buyer has offered under 50% of what the original price of the item is selling for, a common low ball offer.

It begins with the standard incoming message – Is this available message.

Yes I reply and then I’m rolled the low ball offer.

You could (just like I have with $35) reply with a number that you’re after and then the conversation continues.

I had the feeling however after the initial offer and the $5 counter offer to $20 that we were never going to reach a deal as I was looking for $30 as my lowest price I would take. So I decided I needed to cut my losses here (time).

So I follow this up with that rather long paragraph and conclude the conversation. I certainly wouldn’t want to type this on the phone while out and about but I don’t have to as this whole paragraph is tied to a simple keyboard shortcut on my phone of 3 keys.

I simply type out “FBM” on my keyboard and out comes this whole phrase.

It’s an easy way to respond, take the emotion out of it and get negotiations done quickly. In the example Angela (the buyer) has even responded with a like. After all people can and often do change their mind. I have been experimenting with other phrases that could be used to try and speed up other interactions due to the amount of time wasting that can occur.

In this same real example I could have also responded with a price where I had an offer from another buyer for $30 (either real or imagined – in this case real as I sold to another buyer around the same time) with the below phrase. I would simply type $30 as the lowest price I would be prepared to take, make a new line and then type “FBMO” which would generate the following.

The above tells the buyer that this is the market price and implies I will not go any lower (which I won’t) and therefore ends the negotiation with either a “Yes I’ll take it”, a “No thank you”, or no response back at all which is obviously a no.

The other common phrase I would also set up is the initial response to Is this available? There’s been a few times where, after replying yes, this is followed with “where are you located?”. Now alot of people don’t often read the description very well, so people will still ask this question. Therefore why not preempt it by replying:

“Hi there, thank you for your enquiry, yes this item is till available. I am located in XYZ suburb. Would prefer a local pickup but depending on your area I also might be able to deliver (depending on the price)”

There you have it. Once you have this setup, all those messages won’t annoy, frustrate anymore.

If anyone has seen any function negotiating bots for Facebook market place let me know!