Finding products to sell on Facebook marketplace is a pretty easy process. It just takes a little work. In this article, I’ll show you exactly how to find the best products to sell in your Facebook marketplace account to almost guarantee you will be selling right away.
There are 4 steps to this process. These are:
- Researching what is selling currently on Facebook marketplace
- Finding these products on Amazon, Walmart, Etsy, eBay or other sites with the best margins
- Listing these items on your Facebook marketplace account
Researching what is selling currently on Facebook marketplace
In order to figure out what is currently selling on Facebook marketplace, you will need to do this research on your mobile phone. The reason for this is you want to see what is selling. The only place (at this point) this data is available is on mobile. A quick disclaimer – Facebook is constantly changing the layout of Marketplace. What you see in the below picture may not match what you see on your mobile device.
1. Open the Facebook App: Let’s begin by opening the Facebook app on your device. If you do not yet have it, you will need to download it from the Apple store or Google play store. Once you open the app (and login of course), at the bottom of the app you will see the Marketplace tab. Click this now.
2. Filter Marketplace Results: Once you click to Marketplace, we will want to filter in a few different ways. These are 1. Shipping only, 2. Price and 3. Item condition. These filters will almost assure the result received will be from other people dropshipping and thus get us items ready for our account success as well.
There are a few different ways we can apply these filters.First, you will see the option to filter by “Shipping Only” (it is cut off in the view on marketplace in the image). Clicking on this immediately gets us just items being shipped. This prevents us from seeing people who are selling “Local” items for pickup, and therefore NOT items from other dropshippers.
We can also get a similar view by clicking the Categories tab at the top of the screen. Once we do, we have a similar option of clicking “Shipped Listings” thereafter.
3. Apply Final Filters: Now we have the option of applying our final filters, the price and item condition. We apply a price filter in order to get to the best margin/profit items. If we want to make let’s say a minimum of a $6 profit, we will probably need to be at an item priced above $20. To get to this filter, click the icon next to the “Shipping Only” button.
4. Set Price and Condition Filters: Now, we can further add filters for price and item condition. Let’s set the price to $20 and click the button for “New”. Once we set those, scroll down and click “See Listings”.
5. Examine Results: We are now viewing every item that matches our criteria of 1. Shipping only, 2. $20 minimum price and 3. New items only. For the most part, these are the people that are dropshipping on Facebook. It is now up to us to find the items that are selling the most and have the highest profit margin and thus the best dollar profit for us to list in our own Facebook marketplace accounts.
We find these by simply beginning to click on each of the listings in our results. We are first looking for if the item has sold, and if so, how many times it has sold.
Now, we could just go item by item beginning with the clock in the Home Decor category. But, there is one last method to add to our research algorithm. This is knowing which categories sell the most.
In a previous article we published, we look at this data (you can read that article here). Since we already know from our research, the two highest selling categories are Home Decor and Garden and Outdoors.
Let’s start with Home Decor by clicking on the “See All” link. We will need to reapply the filters for the price and condition again (I know, not great design by Facebook). Once we do, we are now looking at our top selling category (Home Decor), filtered by Shipping Only, $20 minimum price, and New items only.
Let’s begin looking through our items now. Again, we are looking for how many have sold. Many of the first listings only sold a couple of times or not at all. Finally, I landed on the listing for the clock we kept seeing in my images above. Let’s have a look at this listing.
The first thing to notice is it has recently sold 57 times. This is pretty good if the numbers work after we finish our analysis. We can also notice it is listed at $1 off. This is good to note as something we may want to emulate in our own listing.
Scrolling down, we see it has a shipping cost of $5. This tells us more about what this person’s actual profit margin is in total.
The total they will receive when selling this item is:
Price: $19.09
Shipping: $5
Total: $24.09
But, on Marketplace, Facebook will charge us 5% of the total amount. We need to back this out in order to get our net received amount.
Total: $24.09
FB Fee (5%): $1.20
Net Received: $22.89
Next, we will want to determine how much we can pay for a similar item on Amazon, Walmart, Ebay, etc. We said we wanted to make a $6 profit on this item. Therefore, we cannot pay more than $16.89 ($22.89 – $6 = 16.89). But that is still not correct.
Amazon, or whomever we buy it from, is going to charge us tax on the item unless we are tax exempt (that is for another article). On a $16 item, in my area of Chicagoland, I’m going to have to pay 8.5% tax. This would be $1.36. If we backed that out of our purchase price, we now have a MAX price we can pay for this item of $14.64, more or less.
With this information, let’s move onto our next process, finding products.
Finding products on Amazon, Walmart, Etsy, eBay or other sites
This is another pretty simple process of just cutting and pasting right on our mobile device. In this example, I will use Amazon as our supplier. You can just as easily paste the full item title into Google and do the exact same steps as below.
Here is the process:
- Copy the full title of the item on Facebook marketplace
- Paste this item into Amazon and click search
- Find items that are in our price range and identify them for listing in our own Facebook marketplace account
1. Copy the Full Title: On the Facebook app, hold your finger over the title and press. This will pull up a little “Copy” button. Click on this. It will copy the entire title into your phone’s memory.
2. Open Amazon: Open the Amazon app on your device and hold your finger in the search area at the top. This will pull up a Paste button. Click this to paste the title into Amazon. Click the Search button on the Amazon app to continue.
3. Examine Results: In these results, we see exact matches to our item on Facebook marketplace. You can tell since the time on the clock is 10:10 and the clock in the picture is open.
You will notice the price of the two exact match items are $19.24 and $24.99, well above our maximum prices we can pay of $14.64. But, the next clock below these results is selling at $14.86, pretty close to our max cost. We can work with this item for certain. It may not be exactly our profit of $6, but it is very close. We will see that later in our analysis.
We also want to determine the best title and description to use for our own listing. If we click on the items above with the dead on image match, we see that our seller from Facebook marketplace is using the exact description as the Amazon seller. Therefore, we can do the exact same thing and expect similar results.
We can use the same method of copy and pasting the entire description from the Facebook marketplace listing directly into our own listing. You can, for the moment, copy the description into a notepad app on your device to be used later.
As well, we know the title the seller on Facebook is using will also work for our listing. In this example, I would use a few more words from our Amazon listing
title since Facebook allows up to 65 characters and it looked a little light to me (I didn’t count them, so don’t hold me to this).
Listing these items on your Facebook marketplace account
Lastly, we just need to post this item to our Facebook marketplace account.
Here is what we have to assemble our listing:
- The title from our listing of another seller on Facebook
- The description from Amazon
- The photo from Amazon
- The pricing from Facebook
- The discount from Facebook
- The shipping from Facebook
Here are our numbers:
Our buy price on Amazon: $14.86
Tax (I’m using 8.5%): $1.26
Total buy price: $16.12
Our sell price: $24.09
Less FB Fee (5%): $1.20
Net Received: $22.89
Our profit (Net received – total buy price): $6.77
This looks pretty good to me, and if you sell 10 per day that is a nice little profit.
