List it and Automate it

[LittleElm]

One of the biggest differences between Ebay and Poshmark that I’ve seen in the past year is that Poshmark is against list it and forget it. I believe this is because a lot of the sellers are people selling out of their closets, and aren’t trying to make a side hustle or a full time business out of it. What has happened because of this trend is that, there are a lot of times where a buyer will buy something, and the seller just ends up not shipping or responding, which lead Poshmark to make “activity” their marker for success on the platform.

The way Posh did this was to create a function that had 2 options called self sharing and community sharing. Community sharing is a part of Posh’s branding where when you share someone else’s items to your followers, they usually do the same. It’s a big part of what they consider important for their branding as a “fun and community minded alternative” to Ebay, but I don’t think it has any effect on sales over.

However, when you self share your items, you will be at the top of the search results when a buyer searches something, until someone else shares their items. This prioritizes the results in a way that the most active people sharing their closets get the most sales. This might not matter as much if you’re selling vintage or high end or rare items, as you would still be on the top page if someone searched for your category.

Since I sell used shoes, one of the hottest and more populated categories on any platform, the one who can automate that self sharing the best wins the sales game. This has essentially created a secondary market on Posh, where people will offer sharing services and virtual assistants who will share your closet 2-3 times a day, for anywhere from $100-200 a month. People have also made sharing bots that you can start manually for as little as $10 a month. There are people who market themselves on places like Instagram, where they take on 5-10 accounts at a time, sharing their closets and can make hundreds to thousands a month, just doing the things that the larger closets don’t want to do.

I have tried out a few of those services, and you essentially get what you pay for, and i’m in a monthly subscription for one that I like a lot for $160 a month. Currently my closet has a little over 900 items, and sharing my closet once a day would take close to 90 minutes, if i did it as fast as i could. Personally I would much rather pay someone to share my closet 3 times a day, and save that time to do get more listings done.

The way I see it, it’s the cost of doing business. Ebay has monthly subscriptions & promoted listings, but Posh doesn’t. You can list as much as you want, and there are no listing fees but there is also no way to have posh prioritize your listings over others. So if you want to sell well, you’re either spending 4-5 hours of your day sharing your closet, or you find someone who will do it for you for as cheap as you can.

I am still catching up on the podcast, but I know Jay and Ryanne did a few tests on Posh and I don’t recall them ever mentioning sharing, because it’s such a bizarre concept to someone who sells successfully on Ebay(list it and forget it), that they probably never even noticed it.

[Retro Treasures WV]

Do you have data on what your monthly Sell thru rate was prior to using this service and what it is after? I am curious how much value you are actually getting from that service.

[LittleElm]

I have a secondary account where we have listed items we didn’t want in our main stores(clothing and other categories), and while they did sell, it took months to sell the 10 items, because unless a buyer was looking for that exact item in that exact size our listing would never show up on the first page, and it’s my guess that most buyers aren’t willing to go through pages of listings and will buy whatever shows up in the first page.

This is from my own experience, and I sell a lot of bread and butter sneakers (Nike, Converse etc.) so if someone is looking for a pair of red converse high tops, there are dozens if not hundreds of listings for such a pair. Making that sale is highly dependent on your pictures, title and how high on the sales results you are, which is similar to Ebay, but the difference is Posh is blind to your previous selling history and treats all sellers the same (there’s no top seller plus weighting in the results).

[Pikapop]

Yeah the increased pressure on staying “active” is one of the reasons why I dropped Poshmark significantly although I had moved stuff in the past. I wonder if it’s worth it to try to sell long tail though, for the reasons you mentioned.

[Author]

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