Gumtree or Facebook Marketplace: Where Should Australians Buy Second-Hand?

Gumtree vs Facebook Marketplace at a glance

Everything in this table comes from Gumtree’s and Facebook’s own help pages, checked on 27 October 2026. Where a help page says nothing, the cell says so rather than guessing.

Two rows decide most purchases. If you want something posted to you with your money protected, Gumtree has the documented system. If you are buying locally and paying at the door, the deciding factor is which site has the listing first, and which one tells you about it in time.

Where the listings actually are

Neither marketplace publishes Australian figures that can be compared like for like. Gumtree’s own About page says it has 6 million users (“Gummies”), more than 2.5 million listings and over 45,000 new listings a day, and its iPhone app holds a 4.7 rating from more than a million Australian App Store ratings. We could not find a published count of Australian Facebook Marketplace users or listings to set against that.

So rather than trust anyone’s general claim, including ours, run the test that matters for you:

1. Pick the exact thing you want: “Nintendo Switch OLED”, “Trek hybrid”, “solid oak dining table”.
2. Search it on both, set to your suburb and the distance you will actually drive.
3. Sort both by newest (“Most Recent” on Gumtree, “Date listed” on Facebook) and count how many appeared in the last week.

That count is the only popularity number that affects your purchase. Run it per category, because the answer for caravans can be different from the answer for kids’ furniture in the same suburb. If you want the same comparison against eBay, the Facebook Marketplace vs eBay guide runs it for shipped goods.

Fees and payments for buyers

For a buyer, the headline is simple: a local pickup paid in cash or by bank app costs nothing extra on either site, because the money never passes through the marketplace. Fees only appear when you use the marketplace’s own payment system, or on the seller’s side.

Gumtree

• Gumtree Pay is Gumtree’s built-in payment system. Its Payments FAQ lists PayPal, Apple Pay, Google Pay, credit and debit cards and PayTo.
• Buyers pay what Gumtree calls a “small service fee”, added automatically to payment requests. The page does not state the amount, so check the total before you confirm. Paying with PayTo takes 90% off Gumtree’s platform fee.
• Gumtree Pay is free for sellers, and sellers are paid into their bank account within 3-5 business days.
• On the seller side, vehicle ads in Cars, Vans & Utes carry a listing fee, with a free Basic tier only for private sellers in NSW, TAS, NT, SA and ACT. Caravans and campervans always need a paid package, and every pets and animals ad has a mandatory fee. Gumtree’s help page gives no dollar amounts.

Facebook Marketplace

A local Marketplace sale is arranged in Messenger and paid in person, so Facebook takes nothing. Facebook does document checkout and delivery, but when we checked on 27 October 2026 both help pages said the feature “isn’t available in your location” and neither listed the countries it covers, so we make no claim about whether you will see it. The seller-side costs are covered in the Facebook Marketplace fees guide.

The practical difference for a buyer: Gumtree gives you a documented way to pay a stranger interstate. Facebook, for most local purchases, is cash or bank transfer at the door.

Shipping, protection and safety

This is where Gumtree has a genuine, documented advantage.

Gumtree Pay with Protected Shipping. When a listing shows the shipping badge, the seller sets the shipping cost and chooses a delivery provider, and you pay for both through Gumtree Pay. Gumtree’s help page says your payment is held until the item has been delivered and you have had a chance to inspect it. If it does not arrive or is significantly not as described, you raise a dispute within 3 days of confirmed delivery. Change of mind is not covered, and Gumtree is clear that it is not the carrier.

The protection has a hard edge: it does not apply to pickup. Gumtree’s Payments FAQ says Protected Shipping does not cover items you collect, even if you pay through Gumtree Pay, so inspect before you pay. Paying with PayPal may add PayPal’s own buyer protection, on PayPal’s terms.

Safety advice is the same on both sites. Gumtree’s buyer and seller safety page says to meet in a busy public place, take someone with you, and inspect before agreeing to a sale, and it states plainly: “Never send money by bank transfer.” Its Safety Hub adds that you should keep every chat in Gumtree Messenger, because scammers try to move you to WhatsApp or SMS and send fake payment links. Gumtree says it never arranges payments or deliveries outside its own platform, which is a useful test: anyone offering “Gumtree delivery” by text is not Gumtree.

The Facebook equivalents, including the fake-courier and overpayment scripts, are in the Facebook Marketplace scams guide, and the meeting and paying checklist is in is Facebook Marketplace safe.

Buying a car: Gumtree or Facebook?

Cars are where the two feel most different, mostly because of the fee.

• Gumtree charges a listing fee on vehicle ads. Private sellers in NSW, Tasmania, the NT, South Australia and the ACT can choose a free Basic tier; Gumtree’s help page names no free tier for anywhere else, so sellers there pick a paid package. Either way, a car can be reposted free until it sells.
• Gumtree’s car search is more structured. Its help page documents sorting by mileage and year on cars, vans and utes, alongside price and a km radius.
• Facebook mixes dealers in with owners. Marketplace has no documented private-seller filter, so dealer stock with “finance available” and “drive away” pricing sits next to genuine owner sales. The guide to filtering out dealerships covers the workarounds. Gumtree’s search help does not document a private-or-dealer filter either.

The paperwork is the same whichever site you found the car on: a PPSR check, the state roadworthy or safety certificate rules, and the 14-day transfer deadline. All of it is in the guide to buying a car on Facebook Marketplace in Australia, which applies just as well to a Gumtree car.

Alerts and speed: the part that decides the deal

Everything above matters less than one thing: the well-priced listing on either site is gone within the hour. A seller who prices a couch to clear by Saturday gets a queue of messages in the first few minutes and picks whoever can come soonest. If you open the app at lunchtime and see it marked pending, the marketplace did not fail you. You were simply message fifteen.

Refreshing does not beat this. Checking five times a day still leaves gaps of hours, and the bargains are listed and claimed inside those gaps. What beats it is being told when the listing appears, and here the two marketplaces differ sharply.

• Gumtree documents its alert properly. A saved search is an email that can arrive immediately, daily or weekly. The immediate option needs a keyword, the search needs a category and a location, you can hold 50 at once, and each one expires after 90 days, so set a reminder to renew. It is email only; the help page mentions no push notification.
• Facebook Marketplace lets you save a search, but Facebook does not say when, or whether, it will notify you. Nor can you exclude words, so a search for “PS5” brings back controllers, games and wanted posts along with the consoles.

So on Gumtree, the free tool is decent: turn on “immediately” for every keyword you care about. On Facebook, the free tool leaves you guessing. The comparison of saved-search alerts across marketplaces has the full table, including eBay, Vinted and Craigslist.

Where Outpost Alerts fits

Outpost Alerts is an Australian-built service that watches Facebook Marketplace for new listings matching your keywords and sends them to an iPhone app, a web dashboard or Discord. It covers Facebook Marketplace only. It does not watch Gumtree, and if Gumtree is where your item turns up, its own immediate email alert is the tool to use.

What it adds on the Facebook side is the part Facebook leaves out:

• Known timing. Your fastest watchlist is checked every minute on Pro, every 3 minutes on Standard and every 30 minutes on Basic. Other watchlists run slower (3 minutes or more on Pro, 5 minutes or more on Standard).
• Include and exclude words. Each watchlist has its own must-have and must-not-have lists, plus a price range, one location and a 5-500 km radius. Exclude words match anywhere in the text, so excluding “case” also drops “with case”; the exclude words guide shows how to pick them.
• Relevance filtering. Across 30,777 listings that matched a watchlist’s keywords, 38.6% were discarded as not the item being searched for (18,890 kept, 11,887 rejected), so the alert that reaches your phone is usually the thing you wanted.
• No Facebook login. Outpost searches Marketplace from its own servers, so nothing touches your account.

It will not value an item, check a car’s PPSR or arrange shipping, and there is no Android app (Android users use the web dashboard). Plans start at US$14.99 a month on the web, with a 3-day trial on every plan. If you buy on both sites, the sensible set-up is Gumtree’s immediate email for Gumtree and a watchlist for Facebook. For other Facebook-side tools that work in Australia, see the Facebook Marketplace alert apps that work in Australia.

FAQ

Sources checked

• Gumtree Help: Creating Saved Searches (checked 27 October 2026): email alerts, immediately / daily / weekly, 50 active, 90 days.
• Gumtree Help: Which categories have a listing fee? (checked 27 October 2026).
• Gumtree Help: Payments FAQ (checked 27 October 2026): Gumtree Pay methods, buyer service fee, PayTo discount, payouts.
• Gumtree Help: Buying an Item that Offers Shipping and Gumtree Returns Policy (checked 27 October 2026).
• Gumtree Help: Buyer and Seller safety and Gumtree Safety Hub (checked 27 October 2026).
• Gumtree Help: How to search and filter results and About Gumtree (checked 27 October 2026).
• Facebook Help: Sort by distance or new listings on Marketplace (checked 27 October 2026).

Marketplace features, fees, and policies change. Confirm current rules in Facebook's Help Center before relying on specific details.