Facebook is making a foray into the e-commerce business with the launch of "Marketplace," a new user-to-user exchange for buying and selling products. For now, the feature will be limited to users within the United States, United Kingdom, New Zealand, and Australia.

Facebook claims that about 450 million people use the platform to buy and sell products evert month. The launch of the "Marketplace" is an evolution of the existing behavior, so the platform can better give its users more formality to carry out business exchanges. Facebook announced that users from the select countries would notice the "Messenger" icon has been replaced by the "Marketplace" in the center bottom row of the social networking mobile app.

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Project manager Bowen Pan told The Verge that "Marketplace" is a hybrid between Craiglist, Ebay, and Amazon. He said that "They [users] were just on Marketplace to casually browse through. This really mirrors an offline experience where you can go to a Sunday market or maybe the mall. You don't know exactly what you want, but you want to browse."

Once a user taps on the "Marketplace" icon, they will be directed to an algorithmically generated homepage filled with products that Facebook assumes the user is interested in. The products are based on the pages that the user has liked, and eventually, what the user has viewed, bought or sold in the marketplace.

Selling an item is as easy as uploading a photo, setting a name, writing a description, and including important details such as the price and the location of the seller. To buy an item, users can browse through a list of categories, search for items or select from a list of nearby listings. "Marketplace" also allows users to change their location so they could search for items in the cities or regions that they prefer.

Facebook said that it plans to roll out "Marketplace" to other countries in the next few months. The company is developing a desktop website for the app.