Back in the days when you wanted to buy something you had to go and meet the seller face to face to negotiate a deal. Now we have the internet. An electronic environment that supports e-business between sellers and buyers, which takes place on an electronic marketplace. It is an electronic commerce which occurs business to business, business to consumer, or consumer-to-consumer. It has four different models:

1. Bilateral negotiation model: when there is one seller and one buyer present.
2. Sales auctions model: when there are many buyers and just one seller.
3. Double auction model: when there are many buyers and many sellers
4. Reverse auction model: when there is just one buyer and many sellers

How do electronic markets and auctions compete?

First of all the businesses that offer an auction or a marketplace compete on design   features. With these features they can make it easier and more pleasant for the customer, who can be a buyer or seller, to use their service. Better features gathers more users. Secondly these businesses compete on the volume of their user base. This volume of users is an advantage for the buyers as well as the sellers. A lot of buyers will attract more sellers, because it will be easier to sell their product. A lot of sellers will attract more buyers because there are more products to choose from. For auctions the user base is important for their income. This income leads to the offering of more products and thus getting more commision in total.

Marktplaats.nl vs Vakantieveilingen.nl

On Marktplaats.nl sellers place a product or quantity of products for sale and buyers bid on these products. The sellers can decide from where on the buyers can bid on their product(s). If they’ve got a minimum price that they want to receive for their product, they can set a minimum bidding level. On the other side we have Vakantieveilingen.nl. Vakantieveilingen.nl places a product or quantity of products for sale and buyers bid on these products. Only here the auction starts and ends at a pre-set time. There is only one winner which is the one with the highest bid when the auction ends. Within this period of time, buyers can bid on the specific product(s). Vakantieveilingen.nl also uses an English auctioning., and buyers can see the bids of other buyers, called open bidding. Vakantieveilingen.nl makes money with commissions that they earn on products that are sold via their auction platform. For example when a teddy bear is auctioned via their auction, a percentage of the price that is paid by the customer goes to Vakantieveilingen.nl. Marktplaats.nl earns their profit in multiple ways. They do this by selling ‘standard’ and ‘premium’ advertisement options. Marktplaats.nl also sells paid features such as a ‘has to go’ sticker’ or an URL in the advertisement. On Marktplaats.nl second-hand car sellers are obliged to pay to post an advertisement, and last but not least they make money on external ads.

Most of us have heard about the deep web, less of us can tell what the deep web contains, and only a few of us can say they have been in the deep web themselves. Even though we know so much about the internet, the content of the deep web mostly remains untouched, and even crazier is that we don’t want to touch the bottom of the deep web. But why? Is the deep web this dangerous?

First of all, let’s make clear what the deep web is. The deep web refers to internet content that is not indexed by search engines, such as Google, Bing, Yahoo etcetera.  Using Google, for instance, is like looking at the sky: we only see clouds, that is all we can ‘find’ while searching. But behind those clouds there is so much more we can’t see but surely is there.  The only thing we see is clouds but there is a much larger universe behind them. So we only find the websites that are indexed by search engines but there is a much larger deep web behind them. To clarify, if we added up all web pages indexed by all search engines, this would be a small 4% of the total  web. The other 96% is the deep web.

So why is the deep web considered as dangerous? This is because everything on the deep web is untraceable. Criminals take advantage of this by using marketplaces such as ‘Silk Road’. The concept of Silk Road is similar to famous marketplaces such as Ebay.com except the fact that on the Silk Road people sell drugs and weapons or even hire contract killers. But does this make the deep web dangerous? I  think the deep web can be considered as dangerous. Since there is minimal security, people that don’t know what they are doing out there should stay away from the deep web. Since in the depths of the deep web, there are hackers and many viruses.

We all know Facebook as a platform where people connect and share their interests with other users. Facebook has an enormous user base containing more than one billion users. By comparison, Europe has fewer inhabitants. But did you ever saw Facebook as an online marketplace for used products?

Most cities or even neighbourhoods have their own ‘commodity markets’ groups which are facilitated by Facebook. According to the billion dollar company, these Facebook groups are visited by more than 450 million people each month. Facebook picked up on this trend among their users and introduced Marketplace on 3 October 2016 in The United States, the United Kingdom, New-Zealand and Australia. This new feature will eliminate the need for these commodity groups, but will it also eliminate the need for existing online second-hand marketplaces, such as the internationally known website Ebay.com and the Dutch website Marktplaats.nl?

Facebook Marketplace could become a big threat for these websites. Let’s have a look at Marktplaats.nl. Marktplaats.nl started as a website for private sellers but nowadays when I look at their website only one out of five advertisements are actually from private sellers. Mostly small companies use Marktplaats.nl to sell their products in a cheap and easy way. When Facebook markets their new feature right the user base of Marktplaats.nl could move to the Facebook Marketplace very quickly. But unfortunately, the launch of Facebook Marketplace did not go as Facebook planned. The new digital marketplace immediately filled itself with illegal goods such as drugs, weapons, paid sex and even body parts. The site’s Commerce Policy strictly prohibits users from selling such items, but to many advertisements seem to slip through the system. Facebook apologized for these events and promised to clean up their marketplace. According to Mary KU, Product Management Director at Facebook, the problem occurred because of a technical problem. The system could not automatically differentiate between legal and illegal deals.

At the moment, I don’t think marketplaces such as Ebay.com and Marktplaats.nl should fear Facebook’s Marketplace. Especially Marktplaats.nl hasn’t got anything to fear yet, since the extension has not yet been released in the Netherlands. But when Facebook fixes their current problems, I believe that their new platform could be the new place to buy and sell used products. I think people like the idea of seeing a profile picture of their seller and see how many friends the particular seller has just to have a safer feeling about closing a deal.