A new online marketplace may be a threat to Trade Me.

The arrival of a new online marketplace may be Trade Me’s biggest threat yet.

About 10 years ago, when Facebook was a fledgling Silicon Valley start-up with a mere 20 million members, I paid a visit to the San Francisco headquarters of Craigslist.com. From a tatty villa in the Sunset District of the city, laid-back chief executive Jim Buckmeister ran the online classifieds listings empire that millions of Americans used as an alternative marketplace to eBay.

Most of the listings on Craigslist at that stage were free – only job and apartment listings drew fees – so the site was the Wild West of the online buy-sell-trade movement. It still is, if you exclude Silk Road sites and the dark web.

Numerous murders have been attributed to meet-ups initiated through Craigslist, which, when I met Buckmeister, was struggling to deal with a wave of fraud in the form of counterfeit cashier’s cheques and money-wiring scams. But from New York to Los Angeles, people loved it as the place to offload an old couch or unwanted baseball tickets.

“Because we view ourselves as a public service, we’re not in the business of worrying about what other companies do,” Buckmeister told me when I asked if he was worried about competition from eBay, which was a minority shareholder in Craigslist, or from social media newbie Facebook.

Now with 1.7 billion users worldwide, Facebook has launched its Marketplace service, which adds a little storefront icon to its mobile app and allows anyone with an account to list photos and descriptions of goods and services for sale or free to a good home. It’s like Craigslist on steroids.

Local trading is encouraged, with the app letting you set up to a 100km limit on displayed listings. Facebook doesn’t charge any fees, make any guarantees or regulate the listings. Users can flag inappropriate items for removal, a feature that led to a flood of red flags when, because of what was described as a “technical issue”, guns, drugs and even babies were listed for sale when the site launched.

I can imagine Buckmeister leaning back in his chair and shrugging off the launch of Marketplace. Craigslist is still going strong, despite no marketing and the site looking like it was designed in 1999.

Closer to home, Trade Me, our online marketplace of choice, will be more concerned about the arrival of Marketplace. Although second-hand goods now make up only a small part of Trade Me’s business, which is dominated by the sale of new goods, real estate and cars, the site is still the go-to channel for pre-loved goods.

The shine has come off Trade Me since it upped its listing fees, but no competitor has gained a toehold – it famously saw off eBay in the early days. Facebook Marketplace could be its most credible threat yet.

But what’s it like to use? A little weird. Ads give scant details and encourage you to jump straight into informal Messenger conversations to discuss the details and haggle. I’ve done exactly that over DVD collections and a smartphone, buying nothing but having some hilarious discussions with hard-bargain-driving sellers in the process.

Consumer New Zealand takes a dim view of all of this, and for good reason. There are no methods for safe payment and no rating systems to indicate the track record of traders. Trade Me employs legions of people to keep its marketplace safe and trusted. That all costs money.

Facebook’s typical approach of running the service long-distance from the US with no personalised service or local staff to answer your questions means Trade Me won’t be troubled any time soon. But it indicates Facebook’s ambition to become a major e-commerce player. New goods can already be bought through Facebook, but it has been slow to take off here. However, a steady trade in used goods has been under way on the site since 2014.

I’m a member of the Done Deals Wellington Facebook group, which has 22,000 members and is where everything from PlayStation consoles to puppies is on offer. Facebook says 450 million members worldwide belong to these informal and uncontrolled groups.

There are some genuine deals and a vibrant trading community emerging on Facebook. But more than ever, the advice remains the same: buyer beware.

Because of a “technical issue”, guns, drugs and even babies were listed for sale.