People today have many choices for where and how they shop for consumer products. One fast-growing option is to shop on digital marketplaces—shopping hubs run by major companies like Amazon and Meta. A Consumer Reports (CR) nationally representative survey of 2,191 U.S. adults in October 2025 found that 95% of consumers used a digital platform to make a purchase in the previous 12 months. Consumers are not only shopping online for new products from businesses but also going online to connect with other consumers to sell and buy products. Consumer-to-consumer (C2C) marketplaces are quickly gaining popularity and the market as a whole is projected to grow from $584.62 billion in 2025 to $1.41 trillion by 2035.
In the U.S., product safety and liability policies have been slow to update and keep pace with the evolving ecosystem and e-commerce business models. When laws and policies are not clear on when a platform should be responsible for product safety or liability, consumers are at risk of purchasing unsafe products online with minimal recourse. This includes platforms that host C2C transactions; these platforms are often less involved and control fewer aspects of transactions than business-to-consumer (B2C) marketplaces, like Amazon and Target. As such, in the absence of up-to-date product safety and liability laws, C2C marketplaces should focus on making the parts of the transaction and experience they can control safer for consumers. This includes requiring clear, adequate, and accurate information about the products being sold, preventing and swiftly removing listings for recalled or banned products, and informing consumers about recalled or banned products in a timely fashion. For more on what policymakers can do to address the current gaps in the law and regulations, see CR’s November 2024 report “Marketplace Accountability in a Digital World.”
While purchasing used products from fellow consumers is not a new concept—traditional, in-person options include yard, garage, and estate sales—digital platforms have enabled consumers to connect with one another through their websites and phone apps to buy and sell both used and new products. When using these C2C marketplaces, consumers should feel confident that the used products they buy or sell online do not pose unreasonable health and safety risks. These marketplaces should play a greater role in making this vision a reality. This includes giving consumers access to accurate and accessible safety information and, to the greatest extent possible, ensuring the safety of the products sold on their marketplaces. These platforms should also ensure that consumers selling products have proper safeguards and access to policies that help to prevent the accidental sale of banned or restricted products.
Following the publication of our evaluation of B2C platforms that host third-party sellers in February 2026, we conducted a focused evaluation of four major platforms that primarily facilitate C2C transactions. For this evaluation, we focused on a platform’s ability to educate consumers, as both buyers and sellers, about unsafe products; prevent the sale of or proactively remove banned or restricted products; and provide clear mechanisms for users to report violative products or safety concerns. With this in mind, CR evaluated four of the largest C2C platforms in the U.S.—Craigslist, eBay, Facebook Marketplace, and Mercari.
Our evaluation and findings show the current state of C2C marketplaces and outline steps that digital platforms can take to make online shopping safer and support more informed consumer decision-making. CR’s recommendations are feasible for digital platforms to deploy and meaningfully improve consumer safety. We encourage digital platforms to review our findings and implement the practices recommended in this report. For additional information on CR’s recommendations and expectations for digital platforms, platforms should refer to our Digital Marketplace Safety Playbook and Digital Marketplace Safety Framework.
To read the full report, click here.