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Members of “for sale” groups on Facebook now have some new tools for hawking their wares on the social networking site. The company announced today that it has changed the way those groups work, so that people with something to sell can easily create a classified ad-style listing for what they’re looking to liquidate.

facebookSellers can add a photo, description, pick-up location and their desired price to the item in the listing, so that people can easily flip through groups and see what they want. In addition, they can mark items as either “available” or “sold” to let buyers know what’s still on the market Facebook will continue to save sold items, so that other group users can see what sellers have already put up through the group.

The new features look a lot like Craigslist and local newspaper classified ads, and bring Facebook closer towards serving as an e-commerce platform for virtual goods and collecting a fee from these local transactions.

It’ll be interesting to see what comes of these features in the future – Facebook was working on mobile payment functionality in its Messenger app last year, and adding that to these tools for sellers could turn the social network into a local marketplace that may rival Craigslist and the host of apps that offer similar local sales functionality.

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