A Facebook Marketplace listing is a sign on a local object. The buyer can come look. That changes the price, the photos, and the risk. You are not describing a parcel to a stranger three states away unless you chose shipping. Most of the trouble on this site is not the price grid. It is a vague photo, a meetup at a house, a payment that was a screenshot, and a conversation that never becomes a person in a parking lot.
How to price for eBay, Poshmark, and Mercari is the shipped version of this problem. Use it when the buyer will not stand in front of the object. Do not copy a mailed sold price onto a couch and then wonder why nobody in town will pay the label you are not charging. This page is the local sale: the tag, the pictures, the meeting, the lowball, the empty parking space.
Who is the local buyer?
The buyer has a car, a limit, and a reason to want the thing this week. They are not browsing a national catalog for the perfect example. They are avoiding a store, a delivery window, or a truck rental. Your competition is the other listing five miles away and the new price at a retailer, not the highest sale in the country.
That helps and it hurts. It helps when the object is heavy, fragile, or annoying to pack: a pressed-steel truck, a dresser with a stuck drawer, a pan you do not want to ship, a lunchbox you would rather hand over than wrap. It hurts when your price assumes a collector who searches by model number and will wait for shipping. Some of those collectors do use Marketplace. Most of the messages you get will not be from them. Price for the message you are actually going to answer.
Say the constraint in the first line. Pickup in a neighborhood, or a cross street, not your door. Dimensions if it has to fit in a car. Whether it comes apart. Whether you tested it. A local buyer will forgive a plain title. They will not forgive a surprise at the curb.
If the object is small and identified, a shipped marketplace may be the better buyer. A common local listing for a tiny object is often a lot of messages and a low offer. The first month of reselling is the choice of one channel. Pick local because the object wants local, not because posting is easy.
How do you price a pickup?
Start with the buyer’s total. On a pickup, the total is the price. There is no label unless you invented one. There may still be a fee, and the fee is not a number this page will print. Open Facebook’s current help for the listing type you are using, the same way the fee note tells you to open any marketplace’s schedule. A cash handoff and a shipped checkout are different products. If the help page and a forum post disagree, the help page is the one that will charge you.
Then look at what the same object has actually brought nearby, if the site will show you completed or sold local listings. An asking price that has been up for weeks is not a sale. Sold comps from a shipped site are a ceiling you have to discount for the smaller crowd, or a check that your local ask is fantasy. Use them as a neighborhood. A chipped piece does not get the intact price because both are in town.
Round numbers. People arriving in a car pay with bills. A price that requires exact change and a speech is a price you will discount in the parking lot anyway. Put the discount in the tag now, or do not offer it.
The new price still matters. If a store sells a new one for about what you are asking, say so to yourself before the buyer does. Used has to be cheaper, or better in a way you can point at, or the buyer will buy new on the way home. Buying used instead of new is their side of that comparison. Your side is not to pretend the store does not exist.
Hold a floor. The floor is the number under which you would rather keep it or try another channel. Write it down. Messages are a bad place to invent it.
What photos does a local listing need?
Daylight, from more than one side. The whole object in one frame so they can see the size. A second frame of the mark, the model, the tag, or the measurement. A frame of the fault that you already mentioned in the text. If you would wince when they turn it over at the meetup, that side is a photo.
A local buyer uses the pictures to decide whether to drive. A dark couch in a cluttered room does not tell them the stain, the sag, or the width of the door. Put a tape measure in the frame if the fit is the question. “Normal size” is not a size.
Do not clean the photo by cropping the scratch. They will see the scratch, and the drive will feel like a trick. Describe it in the same words the photo uses. Tested or untested, the same rule as any other listing. If you plugged it in, say what happened. If you did not, say you did not.
The background can be the garage. It does not have to be a studio. It does have to be bright enough to read. One clear set of photos beats a dozen blurry ones and a paragraph about how sad you are to see it go.
Where do you meet, and how do you get paid?
Meet in a public place, in daylight, where other people are. A store parking lot, a police station lobby that allows exchanges, a busy corner you already know. Tell someone the time and the place. You do not need a script. You need a location that is not your living room.
You can refuse a house call. “I meet at the grocery lot on X street” is a full answer. A buyer who argues about your driveway is a buyer you can skip. The object is not safer because they sound friendly in a message. Friendliness is cheap. A public lot is the control you actually have.
Bring the item, and keep it until the payment is finished. Cash counted in your hand, or a payment app that has cleared in the way that app actually clears, which you learned before the meeting, not from the buyer’s explanation of a pending screen. A screenshot of a payment is not a payment. A promise to pay the rest later is not a sale.
If the object is large, you can meet at your home when you choose to, in daylight, with someone else there, and with the item outside so the buyer does not need a tour of the house. That is a choice, not the default a stranger gets to set. Do not send a pin to your door as the first reply.
Agree on the time in one message. Repeat the price in that message so the parking lot is not a second negotiation you did not plan. If they want to inspect it, good. Inspection is the advantage of local. Stand there while they do it. Do not leave a console “to try at home.”
How do you answer a lowball?
A low offer is a message, not an emergency. Answer once, with your number, if you want to keep talking. Or answer no. You do not owe a counter that splits the difference. The difference between their number and yours is not a fact about the object. Haggling at a yard sale is the same muscle: the floor exists before they speak.
Look at the offer against the floor you wrote down. Above the floor, you can say yes and end it. Below the floor, you can say the price is the price. A second message that insults you is a person you can stop replying to. The item is still listed. Someone else can buy it. Arguing is not a fee you have to pay.
“What’s the lowest you’ll go?” is a request that you bid against yourself. You can name the floor, once. You can also say the listed price is the price. Both are fine. Inventing a new, lower number every time someone asks is how the listing trains the next person to ask.
Bundle only leftovers. If they want the table and also “throw in” the lamp you priced separately, the lamp is the lamp’s price. Do not cut the table because the chat got long.
Ignore the offers that are not offers. A request for a code, a link, a gift card, or any payment that has to be returned in part is not a buyer. You do not need a taxonomy of tricks. You need to stop when the payment is not the simple kind you already understand.
What do you do about a no-show?
People do not arrive. It is the ordinary failure of this marketplace, not a story about you. Set a time. Arrive. Wait a short, decided number of minutes, long enough for traffic and short enough that you are not standing in a lot for an hour. Message once. Then leave.
Do not pull the listing down until they are in front of you and the payment is real. “I’m on my way” is not a sale. A second no-show from the same person is a person you do not schedule again. Relist is the wrong word if you never unlisted. Leave it up.
If you drove and they did not, you spent the cost of local selling. Put it in the mental ledger next to a fee. Local is not free. It is a different bill: time, fuel, and empty waits. A pattern of no-shows on a particular object is information. The price may be fine and the listing may be unclear, or the object may want a different channel. Fix the photo or the pickup line before you blame the town.
A buyer who arrives and then restarts the haggle has used your trip as leverage. You can leave. The price in the message was the agreement to meet. Inspection can reveal a flaw you hid, and then they are right to walk. Inspection that reveals exactly what the photo showed is not a new fact.
When does shipping change the sale?
The moment you offer to ship, you are in the other article. Weight, a real label, packing, a return, and whatever fee the current shipped flow charges. The local price is probably the wrong price for that sale. Look up the label before you say yes to a message that asks “can you mail it?”
Some objects should not cross that line. A heavy, cheap, or brittle thing that was only worth selling because the buyer would carry it becomes a loss in a box. Say no. A small identified thing might be worth more shipped, on a site built for that, which is the pricing guide for those sites. Marketplace can do both. You should not do both by accident in one listing with one number.
If you do ship, say the condition in the same words you would use anywhere else. Untested, cracked, measured. The buyer can no longer turn it over in a parking lot. The photos become the whole inspection. That is a higher standard, not a lower one.
How do you check the thing before you list it?
Point the Worth app at it once, in the same daylight you will use for the listing photos. You get a name and a range, and a look at asking prices elsewhere. Use that to decide whether this is a local pickup or a shipped sale, and whether your floor is a fantasy. The app will not meet the buyer, count the cash, or wait out a no-show. Those stay with you.