How to hide sold, pending and already-seen listings on Facebook Marketplace

What “Pending” and “Sold” mean on Facebook Marketplace

Pending means the seller has put the item on hold, usually because someone said they’ll take it and a pickup is being arranged. Nothing has changed hands. Sold means the seller has marked it gone, or a checkout on Facebook went through.

Pending is the interesting one, because pending sales fall through all the time. The buyer doesn’t show, haggles at the door, or finds something closer. If you really want the item, send one short message and leave it there:

Hi, I see this is pending. If it falls through, I can pick it up tomorrow after 6 for the asking price.

That puts you first in line without pestering anyone. What you should never do is pay a deposit to “hold” a pending item or skip ahead of another buyer. Paying before you see the item is how most Marketplace scams end, and the deposit-to-hold scam starts exactly there. The US Federal Trade Commission’s advice for online marketplaces is blunt about it: pay in a way that protects you, and walk away from anyone who wants a wire, gift card or crypto.

Sold items keep showing up for a plainer reason: many sellers never mark anything sold. They sell the dresser, stop answering, and the listing stays up until it expires.

How to hide a listing on Facebook Marketplace

Facebook lets you hide one listing at a time. According to Meta’s own explanation of Marketplace ranking, a hidden listing stops showing up when you browse or search, and Facebook also shows you fewer listings like it.

On a computer:

1. Open the listing from your search results.
2. Click the ••• button beside Message, Save and Share.
3. Choose Hide listing. It disappears from your results.

In the Facebook app (iPhone or Android):

1. Tap the listing to open it.
2. Tap the ••• button near the top or beside the Save button.
3. Tap Hide listing.

This works, but it doesn’t scale. Hiding is one listing at a time, there is no “hide everything sold” button, and it does nothing for the cards you have already opened and decided against.

Clear sold items out of Saved

Your Saved page is where sold and pending items collect, because they stay there with a label instead of vanishing. To tidy it:

1. Open Saved. On a computer it lives at facebook.com/marketplace/you/saved; in the app, tap your Marketplace profile and then Saved.
2. Look for the Sold or Pending label on each item’s photo.
3. Unsave it with the bookmark icon or the ••• menu.

How to see listings you’ve already viewed

Marketplace doesn’t mark viewed listings in your results. Every card looks the same whether you opened it yesterday or never, which is why it is so easy to open the same couch three times in a week.

What you do have:

• Recently viewed, in the app. Open Marketplace, tap your profile icon, and look under Buying for Recently viewed. It lists listings you opened, newest first. It is useful for finding one you lost, not for skipping ones you’ve seen, because it lives on a different screen from your search.
• Saved, everywhere. Saving is the only list you fully control. Save anything you might come back to, and you never have to hunt for it.
• Your browser history, on a computer. This is the quickest trick nobody mentions. Open your history (Ctrl H on Windows, Cmd Y on a Mac in Chrome) and search for “Marketplace”. Every listing you opened is there by title, with the time you opened it.

None of these change what you see in the grid, which is the real problem.

Hide sold, pending and seen listings automatically

Sift is a free browser extension for Facebook Marketplace and Kijiji. On a computer, in Chrome, Edge or Brave, it does the sorting for you as each page loads:

• Sold, pending and unavailable listings are hidden, in search results and on your Saved page.
• Listings you have opened are marked. You choose what happens to them: dim them (the default), hide them, leave them alone, or flip it around and put a thin outline on the ones you haven’t seen yet.
• New only. Switch it on from the popup and Sift shows only listings it has never shown you, counted from that moment. Reset starts the count again from now.
• A NEW badge marks listings that appeared since your last visit, so a fresh search tells you at a glance what changed.
• Hide anything by hand. Press h with the pointer over a card and it goes. You get 6 seconds to undo.

Nothing is lost. The pill at the bottom of the page counts what Sift hid; click it to peek at every hidden listing with its reason (“Already viewed”, “Sold”) and bring any of them back. The same filters work on Kijiji. Sift doesn’t run in the Facebook app or a phone browser, so on your phone the steps above are still the way. See everything Sift can filter.

Reposted listings: same item, made to look new

A listing gets most of its views in its first days. After that it sinks, so sellers bring it back. Facebook’s own selling tools suggest renewing older listings, and plenty of sellers go further: they delete the listing and post it again, which gives it a new date and puts it back near the top. On Kijiji there are even paid tools that repost ads on a timer.

For a buyer this is useful information that Marketplace hides from you. To spot a repost by hand:

1. Trust your memory of the photos. If a “listed 1 day ago” item looks familiar, it probably is.
2. Open the seller’s profile and look at their other listings. Resellers often have the same item up more than once.
3. Search by image. In Chrome, right-click the main photo and choose Search image with Google. Google Lens shows other places the photo appears, including older copies of the same listing and, now and then, a photo lifted from somewhere else.
4. Check the story against the date. “Moving sale, must go this week” on something you saw a month ago tells you how urgent it really is.

What a repost means for the price

It hasn’t sold. Maybe the price is too high, maybe it’s awkward to move, maybe the seller is busy. Whatever the reason, you have room. If a dresser was $250 three weeks ago and is back at $220 as a “new” listing, an offer of $180 with a firm pickup time is reasonable, not rude. The negotiating guide has wording that sellers answer.

Sift does this part for you. When a seller deletes a listing and posts the same item again, Sift recognizes it and adds a ↻ Reposted badge showing when it was first listed and at what price. If you’d rather not see reposts at all, you can hide them. Sift remembers listings in your browser, so it can only spot a repost of something it has seen before.

Can you see what items sold for on Facebook Marketplace?

No. Marketplace doesn’t publish sale prices. A listing marked sold shows its last asking price, and the seller may well have taken less.

The best free stand-in is eBay’s sold listings. Search eBay for the same item, then tick Sold items in the filters. You see what people actually paid, with dates. For furniture and bulky things, compare with other local listings instead, because shipping changes the price. The guide to checking whether a Marketplace price is fair walks through both, and price history covers how to tell if a listing has already been cut.