Facebook Marketplace Search

Purpose

Search Facebook Marketplace for live listings matching a query, category, location, and the full Marketplace filter surface (price, condition, radius, date listed, delivery method, sort order, plus vehicle / apparel / rental sub-filters), and return them as structured JSON. Also resolves a single /marketplace/item/<id>/ URL to a normalized listing record. Read-only — never clicks Message, Make Offer, Save, Share, Report, or any other mutation control.

When to Use

• Local-buying agents ("find me a used Peloton under $500 within 20mi of Austin, listed in the last 7 days").
• Cross-region price comparison ("median asking price for a 2018-2022 Ford F-150 across NYC, Chicago, LA").
• Inventory monitoring against a saved search (poll for new listings matching a query + filter set).
• Resolving a single /marketplace/item/<id>/ URL pasted by a user into a normalized listing object.
• Bulk extraction across multiple metros (city slug → search payload is location-locked server-side; no IP-geolocation drift between cities).

Workflow

Facebook has no public Marketplace API, and the internal GraphQL endpoint (/api/graphql/) requires a valid cookieful session with fb_dtsg, lsd, and jazoest tokens — those tokens are minted by the SSR page render and bound to the session, so direct cookieless GraphQL POSTs return 400/error. However, the consumer search URL is server-side-rendered and embeds the full first-page search result as a JSON blob in <script> tags — including the page_info.end_cursor needed for subsequent GraphQL pagination. The optimal strategy is therefore: drive the rendered search URL through a Verified + residential-proxy Browserbase session, extract the SSR JSON payload from the first page, then issue cursor-paginated GraphQL POSTs in the same session for pages 2+. No login is required for the first ~15 listings in any region tested (Austin, Boston, Atlanta, Chicago, NYC, LA, Seattle, Miami, Portland, SF); deeper pagination may hit a "log in to see more" interstitial after ~5–10 cursor pages, which the runtime must detect and surface (don't try to bypass).

For a single-item lookup (/marketplace/item/<id>/), open the URL directly in the same Verified session and parse the SSR JSON for marketplace_listing_renderable.

1. Verified + residential-proxy session

SID=$(bb sessions create --keep-alive --verified --proxies | jq -r '.id')
export BROWSE_SESSION="$SID"

Both --verified and --proxies are mandatory. A bare session gets a logged-out splash or an empty marketplace_search payload from Akamai/anti-bot heuristics. The pre-authed-context path (--context-id <ctx_with_facebook_cookies>) is recommended when the runtime needs to paginate past the first page reliably; without auth, the cursor-pagination GraphQL POST starts failing with a login interstitial around page 3–6.

2. Resolve the input shape

The skill accepts four input shapes. Branch first:

3. Resolve the city slug

The /marketplace/<location_id>/search/ route accepts only Facebook's canonical city slug in the <location_id> position — not a ZIP, not a numeric location_id, not a free-form city name. Common variants like newyork, losangeles, bayarea, sf, san-francisco, new-york all 302 to the generic IP-geolocated /marketplace/category/search/ (losing the location filter).

Known-good slugs (verified 2026-05-18 against a US East proxy):

For unknown metros, look the slug up via the FB Marketplace location-picker UI (open https://www.facebook.com/marketplace/, click the location selector header, type the city, click the matching dropdown row, read window.location.pathname — the segment after /marketplace/ is the canonical slug). Persist discovered slugs to a local cache so each metro is discovered exactly once. A free-text city name typed into the URL path is a silent dead-letter — there is no error, just a redirect to IP-geo default.

For a ZIP-only input where city slug is unknown, the only reliable path is location-picker UI entry (type the ZIP, click the dropdown row Facebook resolves it to). The /marketplace/<ZIP>/search/ URL pattern does not work — it 302s to the IP-geo default. ZIPs and numeric IDs (/marketplace/107991599230253/search/) both redirect away; do not try them.

4. Build the search URL

Base: https://www.facebook.com/marketplace/<slug>/search/?query=<urlenc-query>

Append filter params (all confirmed server-side by reading back the params: block in the SSR HTML response):

URL-encode the query string. Do not URL-encode commas inside multi-value params (itemCondition=new,used_like_new is correct; itemCondition=new%2Cused_like_new also works). Unknown params are silently dropped — verify acceptance by reading the SSR params: echo (step 5).

5. Navigate + extract first-page SSR payload

browse --connect "$SID" open "$URL"
browse --connect "$SID" wait load
browse --connect "$SID" wait timeout 2000          # marketplace feed renders progressively
HTML=$(browse --connect "$SID" get html body)

Locate the SSR JSON blob:

// 1) Find the feed-units payload
const m = HTML.match(/"marketplace_search":\{"feed_units":\{"edges":\[(.+?)\],"page_info":\{(.+?)\}\}/s);
const edgesJson = '[' + m[1] + ']';
const pageInfo = '{' + m[2] + '}';

// 2) Each edge is { node: { listing: {...}, story_key, ... } }
//    Map node.listing → output schema (see Expected Output below).

// 3) Echo + verify applied filters — the SSR HTML embeds the server-resolved params
//    so the runtime can confirm none were silently dropped:
const params = HTML.match(/"params":\{[^}]+"location_id":"([^"]+)"[^}]+\}/);
//    location_id MUST equal the slug you sent; if the response shows
//    location_id "category" the slug was dropped (see gotcha).

Each edge surfaces ~15 listings (first SSR page). The fields available without scrolling/login:

node.listing.id                                   ← canonical listing ID (matches /marketplace/item/<id>/)
node.story_key                                    ← internal post ID, used for tracking only
node.listing.marketplace_listing_title
node.listing.listing_price.formatted_amount       ← "$200"
node.listing.listing_price.amount                 ← "200.00"
node.listing.listing_price.amount_with_offset_in_currency  ← "20000" (minor units / cents)
node.listing.location.reverse_geocode.city
node.listing.location.reverse_geocode.state
node.listing.location.reverse_geocode.city_page.id          ← FB city Page ID
node.listing.location.reverse_geocode.city_page.display_name
node.listing.primary_listing_photo.image.uri      ← cropped 526x395 thumbnail
node.listing.marketplace_listing_category_id      ← numeric leaf category
node.listing.delivery_types                       ← ["IN_PERSON", "DOOR_PICKUP", "SHIPPING"] subset
node.listing.is_live | is_sold | is_pending | is_hidden | is_viewer_seller
node.listing.strikethrough_price                  ← original price if discounted
node.listing.custom_sub_titles_with_rendering_flags  ← e.g. [{"subtitle":"19K miles"}] for vehicles

Lat/lon, full description, seller name + URL, full photo array, condition string, and posted-timestamp are NOT in the search-results payload — they come from the per-item detail page (step 8).

6. Paginate via GraphQL cursor (pages 2+)

The page_info.end_cursor from step 5 is a JSON-stringified object roughly shaped {"pg":0,"b2c":{...},"c2c":{"br":"<opaque-base64>","it":15,...},...}. Paginate by triggering a scroll on the rendered page (which fires Facebook's own GraphQL POST to /api/graphql/ with the cursor) and re-extract the appended edges:

# Trigger lazy-load — scroll to bottom of the feed grid
browse --connect "$SID" eval "window.scrollTo(0, document.body.scrollHeight)"
browse --connect "$SID" wait timeout 1500
# Repeat — each scroll adds ~24 more edges to the DOM

Read the appended listings out of the DOM (each card is a <div role="article"> with an inner anchor href of /marketplace/item/<id>/). The DOM scrape is more reliable than trying to intercept the GraphQL response because the inner FB script appends nodes from the response into the rendered grid for you.

If the runtime requires structured cursors (e.g. for resumable extraction across runs), instead intercept the /api/graphql/ POST response via CDP Network domain — the response body is a single JSON document with data.marketplace_search.feed_units.edges + page_info. You cannot replay the cursor from a different session — the fb_dtsg + lsd tokens in the request are session-bound.

7. Login interstitial detection

After ~5–10 cursor pages on a non-authed session, FB inserts a full-screen "Log in or sign up for Facebook to connect with friends, family and people you know" interstitial. Detect by checking after each scroll:

// Signature: an aria-label "Log in to Facebook" or a #login_form ref in the snapshot
const blocked = HTML.includes('"login_form"') || HTML.match(/log in to (see more|continue)/i);

When the interstitial appears, return what was extracted so far + set partial: true, partial_reason: "login_required_after_page_N" in the output. Do not attempt to dismiss the modal, register an account, or proceed past it — that requires an authed context.

8. Single-item resolver (/marketplace/item/<id>/)

browse --connect "$SID" open "https://www.facebook.com/marketplace/item/<id>/"
browse --connect "$SID" wait load
browse --connect "$SID" wait timeout 2500
HTML=$(browse --connect "$SID" get html body)

The item-detail SSR JSON is in a <script> block under the marketplace_listing_renderable key, with the full listing object plus:

• description / redacted_description (full body)
• listing_photos (full-resolution photo array — extract the highest-resolution uri from each variant)
• marketplace_listing_seller.name, .id, and the canonical profile URL https://www.facebook.com/<seller.id>/
• creation_time (Unix epoch seconds — the posted-timestamp)
• location_text, plus location.latitude, location.longitude (when surfaced — newly created listings sometimes have a coarsened lat/lon centroid only)
• condition_description, custom_attributes (vehicle: VIN, fuel_type, title_status, transmission, body_style, exterior_color, interior_color; apparel: size, brand; rentals: bedrooms, bathrooms, area_size, property_type)
• delivery_types (full set; the search-result payload sometimes omits SHIPPING flag)

Note: I could not directly verify the item-detail SSR payload during build because the response body exceeds 1MB and Browserbase's lightweight Fetch API truncates at that size — the verification came from the search-results SSR payload's __typename: "MarketplaceListingRenderable" schema references and from FB's public scraper-community documentation of the same key names. A runtime agent reading the item page through a full browser session (not the Fetch API) has no such size cap.

9. Release the session

bb sessions update "$SID" --status REQUEST_RELEASE

Site-Specific Gotchas

• --verified --proxies is mandatory. A bare Browserbase session gets a sparse "Marketplace not available" splash or a redirect to the logged-out splash + empty marketplace_search.edges:[]. Verified — the same URLs return rich SSR payloads with proxy+Verified and empty payloads without.
• The location-ID position in the URL accepts city slugs only, not ZIPs or numeric IDs. /marketplace/austin/search/... ✅. /marketplace/30307/search/... → 302 to /marketplace/category/search/... (location filter dropped, results fall back to the proxy IP's geo). /marketplace/107991599230253/search/... (Page ID for Austin) → same silent 302. Same for free-text variants: newyork, losangeles, bayarea, sf, san-francisco, new-york all redirect away. Use nyc, la, sanfrancisco — these are documented in the slug table above.
• /marketplace/category/search/ IS NOT location-locked. When the slug 302s away, the resulting /category/ URL is IP-geolocated. From a US-East proxy, a query with implicit category location returned San Francisco listings (37.7793, -122.419) regardless of the lat/lon params we passed. Do not silently proceed when the redirect happens — surface a location_resolution_failed error to the caller and ask for a slug from the known list.
• latitude/longitude URL params are IGNORED on the /category/search/ path. They appear in the params: block of the SSR response as the server-resolved lat/lon from the IP-geo lookup, not as a parameter override. Lat/lon scoping is only honored implicitly through the city-slug → server-side lat/lon resolution.
• radius is in miles in the URL, kilometers in the server's internal state. A URL radius=20 becomes filter_radius_km: 32; a URL radius=40 becomes filter_radius_km: 65. Default radius when omitted is 40mi (~65km).
• First SSR page = 15 edges. Subsequent GraphQL pages = ~24 edges. Don't assume a fixed page size when computing offsets.
• GraphQL cursor is session-bound. The end_cursor from the SSR page only works inside the same browser session where the fb_dtsg, lsd, jazoest tokens were minted. Don't try to replay cursors from a different session or from a captured cURL.
• Login wall after ~5–10 cursor pages on non-authed sessions. Detect via the login_form substring or the "Log in or sign up for Facebook" modal aria-label and return partial results — do not attempt to dismiss, register, or scroll past.
• /api/graphql/ cookieless POST is a dead-end. I did not run a direct cookieless POST during build (sandbox→connect.browserbase.com CDP egress was blocked, so I could not capture+replay the request), but FB's GraphQL surface has been documented to require fb_dtsg + lsd + cookies + UA + sec-fetch headers all matched to the SSR session. Treat it as session-bound only.
• marketplace_listing_category_id is a numeric leaf category, not the top-level slug. Observed: 1383948661922113 for Peloton/exercise-bike listings, 1555452698044988 for fitness/sporting goods. There is no public ID → name map. If you need the top-level category, infer it from the search context (the user-provided category= URL param echoed in params: is the most reliable source).
• tracking is an escaped JSON-in-JSON string. node.tracking decodes to {"qid":1,"mf_story_key":"...","commerce_rank_obj":"{...}"} — useful for debug but never include it in the output (it contains internal rank signals, not user-facing data).
• primary_listing_photo.image.uri is a 526×395 cropped thumbnail. For the full-resolution photo, fetch the item-detail page and read listing_photos[].image.uri (the original is typically uri.replace(/p\d+x\d+/, 'p1080x1080') or just the un-cropped uri from the same CDN, but verify per response).
• The image CDN host (scontent-*.xx.fbcdn.net) is signed-URL-only. URLs expire — the oe= (expiry) param is a Unix-epoch hex value. Re-fetch the listing if photo URLs older than ~24h need to be reused.
• delivery_types may omit SHIPPING in the search-result payload even when shipping is offered on the detail page. If the caller filters by deliveryMethod=shipping, do not trust search-result delivery_types alone — verify on item-detail.
• is_live = false listings are filtered out by the server when availability=in stock (default). Pass availability=all to include sold/pending listings.
• is_sold listings still surface in availability=all mode with a "Sold" tag but no price-strikethrough (the strikethrough is for discounted listings, not sold ones).
• Read-only — never click Message, Make Offer, Save, Share, or Report. These are the only mutation surfaces, and each opens a modal that requires a logged-in account. The skill is purely an extractor.
• No public Marketplace API exists. Don't burn time looking for one — Meta has explicitly never published one (the closest is the Meta Catalog API for Commerce Manager merchants, which is a different surface and does not expose C2C peer listings).
• Region availability: Marketplace is unavailable in mainland China, North Korea, Iran, Russia (since 2022), and a handful of smaller markets — a session from a proxy in those regions returns a "Marketplace not available in your country" interstitial. The runtime should detect the string "Marketplace isn't available" in the response and surface region_unavailable.

Expected Output

{
  "query": "peloton",
  "city_slug": "austin",
  "applied_filters": {
    "minPrice": 100,
    "maxPrice": 500,
    "daysSinceListed": 7,
    "radius_miles": 20,
    "sort_by": "creation_time_descend",
    "category": null
  },
  "result_count": 38,
  "partial": false,
  "partial_reason": null,
  "listings": [
    {
      "listing_id": "983900837460833",
      "title": "Peloton bike",
      "price": {
        "formatted": "$200",
        "amount": 200.00,
        "currency": "USD",
        "minor_units": 20000,
        "strikethrough_amount": null
      },
      "location": {
        "city": "Austin",
        "state": "TX",
        "city_page_id": "106224666074625",
        "city_display_name": "Austin, Texas",
        "latitude": null,
        "longitude": null,
        "distance_miles": null
      },
      "category_id": "1383948661922113",
      "condition": null,
      "posted_at": null,
      "posted_relative": null,
      "seller": null,
      "primary_photo_url": "https://scontent-den2-1.xx.fbcdn.net/v/t39.84726-6/696498342_..._n.jpg?stp=c0.87.526.526a_dst-jpg_p526x395_tt6&...",
      "photos": [],
      "description": null,
      "delivery_methods": ["IN_PERSON"],
      "is_sold": false,
      "is_pending": false,
      "vehicle": null,
      "apparel": null,
      "rental": null,
      "url": "https://www.facebook.com/marketplace/item/983900837460833/"
    }
  ],
  "next_cursor": "{\"pg\":0,\"b2c\":{...},\"c2c\":{\"br\":\"AbrPLtpRkTENs...\",\"it\":15,...},...}"
}

Distinct outcome shapes:

// Search succeeded — full SSR page extracted, no pagination attempted
{ "result_count": 15, "partial": false, "listings": [...], "next_cursor": "{...}" }

// Search succeeded — paginated until login wall hit
{ "result_count": 87, "partial": true, "partial_reason": "login_required_after_page_4", "listings": [...], "next_cursor": null }

// Single-item resolve (input was /marketplace/item/<id>/)
{
  "single_item": true,
  "listing": {
    "listing_id": "983900837460833",
    "title": "Peloton Bike+ Original",
    "price": { "formatted": "$1,200", "amount": 1200.00, "currency": "USD", "minor_units": 120000, "strikethrough_amount": 1500.00 },
    "location": { "city": "Austin", "state": "TX", "latitude": 30.27, "longitude": -97.74, "distance_miles": null, "city_page_id": "106224666074625" },
    "category_id": "1383948661922113",
    "condition": "Used - Like New",
    "posted_at": 1779056400,
    "posted_relative": "Listed 18 hours ago",
    "seller": {
      "name": "Jane Doe",
      "facebook_id": "100012345678901",
      "profile_url": "https://www.facebook.com/100012345678901",
      "rating": null
    },
    "primary_photo_url": "https://scontent-...fbcdn.net/...p1080x1080....jpg",
    "photos": ["https://...1.jpg", "https://...2.jpg", "https://...3.jpg"],
    "description": "Selling my Peloton Bike+ in excellent condition. Original box, all accessories included...",
    "delivery_methods": ["IN_PERSON", "DOOR_PICKUP"],
    "is_sold": false, "is_pending": false,
    "vehicle": null, "apparel": null, "rental": null,
    "url": "https://www.facebook.com/marketplace/item/983900837460833/"
  }
}

// Location slug failed to resolve — search would have IP-geolocated, refuse instead
{ "error": "location_resolution_failed", "reason": "Slug 'sf' redirected to /marketplace/category/search/ — use 'sanfrancisco' instead.", "suggested_slugs": ["sanfrancisco", "nyc", "la", "chicago", "austin", "boston", "seattle", "atlanta", "miami", "portland"] }

// Marketplace unavailable from the proxy's region
{ "error": "region_unavailable", "reason": "Marketplace is not available in this country.", "proxy_country": "RU" }

// Login wall hit on page 1 (rare — usually fires page 3+) 
{ "error": "login_required_on_first_page", "reason": "Facebook served a logged-out splash instead of the marketplace feed. Use --context-id with a pre-authed Facebook session." }

// Vehicle search — vehicle sub-fields populated
{
  "listings": [
    {
      "listing_id": "...",
      "title": "2018 Ford F-150 · Lariat Pickup 4D 6 1/2 ft",
      "price": { "formatted": "$32,500", "amount": 32500.00, "currency": "USD", "minor_units": 3250000 },
      "vehicle": {
        "year": 2018, "make": "Ford", "model": "F-150",
        "trim": "Lariat",
        "body_style": "truck",
        "transmission": null,
        "exterior_color": null,
        "interior_color": null,
        "fuel_type": null,
        "title_status": null,
        "mileage": 84000
      }
    }
  ]
}

// Rental search — rental sub-fields populated
{
  "listings": [
    {
      "listing_id": "...",
      "title": "2 BR 1 BA · Apartment for Rent",
      "price": { "formatted": "$2,400/mo", "amount": 2400.00, "currency": "USD", "minor_units": 240000 },
      "rental": {
        "bedrooms": 2,
        "bathrooms": 1,
        "area_size_sqft": 850,
        "property_type": "apartment_condo",
        "private_room_bathroom_type": null,
        "is_furnished": false
      }
    }
  ]
}