What Do ISO, OBO and Pending Mean on Marketplace?

The short version: ISO means "In Search Of" and signals you're looking to buy something rather than sell it, OBO means "Or Best Offer" and invites buyers to negotiate below your asking price, and Pending means a seller has provisionally agreed a sale with someone but hasn't marked the item as sold yet. All three are about managing expectations, and most of the friction on Marketplace comes from people not understanding that Pending is not a promise.

ISO: In Search Of

ISO stands for "In Search Of." You'll see it at the start of a post title, like "ISO: dining table, seats 6, under £150." It's a buyer posting a wanted ad rather than a seller listing an item. Marketplace was built for selling, so ISO posts are a bit of a workaround, people use the same groups and feeds to flip the usual direction and ask the crowd to come to them instead.

It's more common in local buy-and-sell Facebook groups than in the official Marketplace tab itself, because Marketplace's structure is built around individual listings with photos and prices, not requests. If you're hunting for something specific, like a secondhand kiln or a particular model of pram, ISO posts in niche groups often outperform scrolling Marketplace search, because sellers who have the exact thing but haven't listed it yet will message you directly.

Say you're renovating a kitchen on a budget and you post "ISO: gas hob, any condition, will collect" in a local group of 8,000 members. You're more likely to catch someone who was about to put theirs in a skip than to find it already listed with a price tag, because plenty of people have usable stuff sitting in a garage that they'd happily give away or sell cheap if someone just asked.

OBO: Or Best Offer

OBO means "Or Best Offer," and it's a pricing signal, not a discount code. A seller writing "£80 OBO" is telling you the £80 is a starting point and they'll entertain lower offers, but it doesn't commit them to accepting the lowest one. This is where a lot of first-time Marketplace buyers get the etiquette wrong.

A reasonable OBO offer is usually within 15 to 25 percent of the asking price. If something is listed at £100 OBO, offering £80 is normal and often accepted on the spot. Offering £30 on the same item is likely to get ignored, or worse, get you quietly blocked, because sellers interpret lowball offers as a sign you're not a serious buyer and not worth the back-and-forth.

Worked example: imagine a seller lists a secondhand road bike for £220 OBO. Three people message. One offers £200 and asks to collect that evening. One offers £150 and says "let me know." One offers £60 "if it's still available." The seller takes the £200 offer almost immediately, not because it's the highest, but because it came with a time and a plan. OBO rewards buyers who make it easy to say yes, not buyers who simply name the lowest number.

Sellers can also write "no offers" or "firm" if they don't want to negotiate at all, and that's worth respecting, messaging someone with an offer after they've written "price firm" just wastes everyone's time and gets your message ignored.

Pending: the status almost nobody understands

Pending is the status Marketplace shows when a seller marks a conversation as having a likely buyer, before the item is sold. The seller taps a button in Marketplace to flag that a sale is probably happening with a specific person. It sits between "available" and "sold."

Here's the part that causes most of the arguments: Pending is not binding. A seller can mark a chat as pending, have that buyer go quiet or flake on collection, and then mark a different buyer's chat as pending instead, or sell to whoever turns up with cash first. There's no contract, no deposit system built into Marketplace, and no mechanism that stops a seller changing their mind. If you've ever had an item marked "pending" with you and then watched it disappear from the listing a day later sold to someone else, that's not a glitch, that's exactly how the feature is designed to work.

This is the uncomfortable bit most guides skip over: Pending exists to protect the seller's flexibility, not the buyer's place in the queue. Sellers are told, explicitly in Facebook's own help content, that marking something pending doesn't remove it from other people's search results and doesn't stop other buyers messaging. So if you're a buyer and a seller tells you "it's yours, I've marked it pending," that's a soft verbal agreement at best, not a reservation. If the item matters to you, the only real protection is turning up fast, with cash or payment ready, and not waiting around after a pending message.

A quick step-by-step for sellers who want to avoid the awkward "I sold it to someone else" message:

• Agree a specific collection time with the buyer, not just "later today"
• Mark the item as pending only once that time is locked in
• Tell any other interested buyers straight away that it's pending, rather than leaving them hanging
• If the first buyer doesn't show within an agreed window, say 24 hours, message the next person in line immediately and mark the item available again
• Once the sale is done, mark it as sold so it stops showing up in other people's searches and saved lists

If you want the listing gone entirely rather than left sitting as sold, our guide on how to delete a Facebook Marketplace listing on every device walks through the exact steps on phone, tablet and desktop.

Why these abbreviations matter more than people think

Marketplace runs almost entirely on text chat, and these three terms are doing the job that a real shop checkout process would normally do, they're signalling intent, price flexibility and transaction status without any of the infrastructure a real marketplace platform would build in. There's no escrow, no "reserve for 24 hours" button, no cancellation policy. ISO, OBO and Pending are the community's own patched-together language for a system that was never designed with much structure.

That also means the etiquette around them is informal and inconsistently applied. Some sellers treat pending as a firm hold, some treat it as a loose signal. Some buyers think OBO means they can offer half price, others know it means 15 to 20 percent off. If you're using Marketplace regularly, whether buying or selling, it helps to state your own terms plainly in the first message rather than assuming the other person reads these abbreviations the same way you do. Something as simple as "happy to hold until 6pm, after that I'll offer it to the next person" removes almost all the ambiguity that Pending leaves open.

If you're selling through Marketplace often enough that these mix-ups are costing you time, it's worth treating your listings a bit more like a small storefront. Respond fast, set clear collection windows, and don't be afraid to say "no offers" when you mean it. None of that needs software or a course, it's just slightly more discipline than most casual sellers bother with.

A note on safety and privacy while you're negotiating

Because Marketplace chats run through your main Facebook account, it's worth knowing what buyers and sellers can and can't see about you. If you're worried about privacy during a transaction, our piece on hiding your Facebook account without deleting it covers how to limit what a stranger sees when they click into your profile after a Marketplace chat. And if you've ever wondered whether the other person knows you've seen their message, our explainer on whether Facebook has read receipts is relevant, because Marketplace chat does show "seen" timestamps, which is exactly why ignoring a pending buyer's message tends to blow up faster than people expect.

Photos are worth a thought too. If you're selling something with identifying details in the background, it's worth knowing whether Facebook strips metadata from the photos you upload before you post anything with location data attached.

Frequently asked questions

Does marking something pending on Facebook Marketplace reserve it for that buyer?

No. Pending is a status flag the seller sets, but it doesn't stop the item appearing in search or stop other buyers from messaging, and the seller can switch to a different buyer at any point before the sale is finalised.

What's a fair offer to make on an OBO listing?

Somewhere between 15 and 25 percent below the asking price is usually taken seriously, especially if you pair it with a specific collection time, offers much lower than that are often ignored.

Can I still message a seller if an item shows as pending?

Yes, and you should if you're interested, because pending deals fall through often enough that being the backup buyer is a real position, not a wasted message.

Is ISO the same thing as a Marketplace listing?

No, ISO posts are buyers asking the group for an item they want, usually in local Facebook buy-and-sell groups rather than the official Marketplace tab, which is built for sellers listing items for sale.