A new Facebook Marketplace rule could make it harder to find legit car listings

As if shopping for a used automotive isn’t exhausting sufficient, the deceptive dealership listings that litter up promoting platforms like Fb Market and OfferUp don’t make issues any simpler. In an replace first noticed by a person on Reddit, Meta introduced that it’s limiting dealerships’ capacity to listing automobiles on Market, however this possible doesn’t imply these pesky listings will disappear for good (through Jalopnik).

When you’ve ever shopped for a used automotive on-line, you in all probability know the sorts of dealership listings I’m speaking about. They usually present solely a automotive’s required down cost, or — much more annoyingly — listing automobiles at $1 in an try to seize your consideration.

However beginning January thirtieth, 2023, dealerships will run right into a roadblock when attempting to publish a used automotive on the market on Market: they’ll not be capable to listing automobiles from their enterprise web page. That is alleged to be Fb’s approach of nudging dealerships in direction of shopping for Market adverts, however what it will in all probability do is create an excellent bigger inflow of sellers that publish free listings from a private Fb profile. This might make it even tougher to tell apart legit listings posted by somebody close by, versus the dealer-backed listings which might be usually too good to be true.

On high of that, Meta’s enterprise help web page doesn’t explicitly discourage the usage of private profiles for dealerships, both. It describes a listing of “different methods” dealerships can attain consumers with out posting Market listings from their enterprise web page, and certainly one of these options is to purchase “create Market listings for automobiles, dwelling gross sales and residential leases out of your private profile.”

There are already tons of dealerships who guise themselves as an actual (or pretend) particular person when posting an inventory on Market. And though these listings are alleged to have a “dealership” label beneath the itemizing’s photograph, this tag is commonly lacking. Once I carried out a seek for automobiles close to me, I got here throughout a number of scammy-looking automotive dealership listings posted by private accounts, with “Dealerships” tags sprinkled few and much between. The Verge reached out to Fb to see if it has any plans to deal with the deceptive listings posted by particular person accounts, however didn’t instantly hear again.

Meta’s new Market rule applies to sellers in a number of nations, together with the US, Canada, France, UK, Mexico, Brazil, Indonesia, Germany, and Australia. The corporate’s additionally extending the rule to sellers who publish actual property and rental listings, however solely within the US.