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Shipping on Posh is a flat fee. Notice how in your listings it never asks you for the weight of an item, nor the dimensions of the package. You can use any Priority box from USPS – including flat rate boxes, regional rate boxes, or regular by weight boxes, or even your own plain box. You just can’t use the white/blue express boxes. That policy has evolved over time and the Posh FAQ’s are very outdated. There was a lot of push back from local post offices about what boxes are allowed but if you’ll notice right on the label itself it has a note to the local postmaster to see postal bulletin 22435 which I have not personally read. Also, in the email from Posh that has the label as an attachment, it clearly says if your package/bundle is more than 5 pounds than you (the seller) have to purchase a postage upgrade, which thankfully I’ve never had to do. Some sellers (including a very popular social media “influencer” allegedly) got into trouble shipping mystery “reseller boxes” crammed full of jeans or whatever and evidently went over the 5 lb rule often enough that it got noticed. But that’s just a rumor, and you didn’t hear it from me.
Customers pay for shipping on top of what they pay for your item on Poshmark. The benefit is that Posh has negotiated a sweetheart deal with the USPS where they get a flat $6.49 (I think it just went up to $6.79 or so) for up to 5lb. I see an opportunity for selling boots and heavier shoes on Posh because the shipping is so much less than eBay when you get to 2 or more lbs.
Posh Pros
Cheaper shipping on heavier items
Easier listing – way less info. eBay seems to add a new field I have to fill out every month.
Built in social media aspect – liking and sharing other people’s listings gets you viral views through their followers, and their followers’ followers, etc.
The Posh app is very slick and modern looking. It’s marketed to younger people as an app and the ease of use and list-from-your-phone means the platform is geared towards younger people. Young people like to buy things on their phone, are more fashion conscious, but on the other hand don’t have as much money as older, more established adults.
It’s just a different demographic. Sometimes things that won’t sell for over a year on eBay (even if refreshing the listing) will sell very quickly on Posh. and vice versa. Being on Posh is just casting your net wider.Posh Cons
The users seem to be about 95% resellers interacting with each other, with many fewer buyers than eBay, and my sales on both reflect that. But it is growing.
Fixed $6.79 shipping is great for heavy items, but makes it a hard sell for a light blouse or t-shirt or tie. Hopefully as the company expands and the platform grows, they might offer a 1st class option.
People love to lowball you, in some cases 50% of asking price. Asking prices seem very inflated vs eBay, possibly due to naivete by newbies seeing “influencers” making thousands of dollars. If you do make an offer to someone that is considerably lower than what you listed it, they’ll counter with even lower. Much lower.
When you make an offer to someone, you HAVE to offer a shipping discount. If you’re like me and your margins are already thin, that means you have to offer less off the asking price to account for the shipping discount.
You can’t offer a discount unless it is at least 10% below your lowest ever price. Which means when you raise prices (when you realize people want to haggle), you can’t offer discounts. People expect discounts.I wonder if people are checking stolen pre-paid debit cards by buying something on eBay just to see how much is on the card. I mean if there’s less than $20 than maybe it’s not worth the risk to them. But if they can prove there’s hundreds, it starts to look interesting.
I’m very concerned how it will affect legitimately licensed small business owners like myself who already collect and pay sales tax in one of the states that eBay is taking over collecting and submitting. I just submitted a tax question through WA state’s tax system. I got an automated response that I should receive a reply in 15 days. Sweet bureaucracy.
FYI Ryanne I also got the opt-in email a couple of weeks ago and ignored it. I do NOT want to be a beta tester. Well a few days ago I got an actual physical card in an envelope (all fancy) asking us to opt in. The bullet points were weak and the “lower selling fees” was quoted as 2.7% which is a pathetic 0.3% drop from PayPal. Not enough to make up for the hassle of having to transfer money to PayPal to purchase labels. My question is this – if we aren’t giving PayPal transaction fees, would they then charge us a fee to purchase postage labels???
Also when I first started eBay there was a checkbox on the create listing page that said “automatically relist up to 3 times if item doesn’t sell.” That went away and I was very mad because relisting is a pain. This past week it came back, but now says 8 times. Based on the fact that it was 3 months and the algorithm punishes stale listings after 3 months, does that mean they’ve adjusted the algorithm to consider 8 months stale???
I found a workaround. Right-click and copy the image from Adobe Reader and paste it into Microsoft Paint or whatever paint program a Mac has. You should be able to print to your label printer from there, although you might have to play with your page setup settings (change to portrait and set all margins to zero).
I just tried the bulk editor to find that I had 3 listings with only 1 photo. Interestingly there was en entry under “errors and warnings” called Photos and when I clicked on it the listings affected were filtered for. I didn’t notice it until I’d already found and fixed the first 2 but if you have a big store and lots of effected listings it would take you right to it. I’m not sure if this is a new feature or not in response to the recent photo glitch.
Jay and Ryanne: I have an alternative plan for you guys – maybe you can hire another helper and just do what you are doing now, but just go more often. Being annoyed by the amount of listing shouldn’t be a problem if somebody else is doing it. You guys seem to get good stuff every time you go, so it stand to reason you’re missing out on a lot of stuff in the month and a half you’re not going. Since you guys have an anchor store and your own warehouse, I’d just go all out. Everything sells eventually.
I was one person that mentioned getting SKU’s showing up on the mobile app. It popped up for my gf on her store and I couldn’t believe what I was looking at! It’s the most obvious thing in the world that it should have been there from the beginning. I checked mine and I have it too (we are both on android fyi). Interestingly I started getting the new label printing page a week and a half ago but my gf has not, so that’s not it. Some time after I started getting the new label experience, the sku started auto populating there as well so I didn’t have to copy and paste all the time when printing a label (it definitely wasn’t there when I first started getting the new label page). Then randomly one day it stopped auto populating the sku, and then the next day I went back to the old label page, then the next order I had went back to the new label page, with sku again. It’s still VERY beta.
You guys talk about releasing buggy software, and I get corporate pressure and aggressive deadlines. But what kind of corporate culture do you have when you put so much pressure on the web guys that they don’t care if it’s ultra buggy? They need to have a heart to heart amongst themselves and be honest about what’s going on behind the scenes, to each other if not to us. Somebody needs to be in a position to say “Hey, it’s just not ready yet.”
That talk about problems with the new payment system has me worried. We went almost a month without the ability to see our listing views consistently and they lost pictures and can’t recover them. Do you trust them with your money? I don’t. I won’t switch over until they force me to.
I’m trying not to poop on eBay which has been good to me, but I’m diversifying to Poshmark as of this past week.
I’m too lazy to do a sales report every week like you guys, but I just wanted to share that I sold a sleeveless acid washed jean jacket to the costume department of the Goldbergs TV show last week. I couldn’t believe it but a Google search of address showed as Sony studios so confirmed. Didn’t Jay and Ryanne sell a rotary phone to the Goldbergs? Seems they very much shop on eBay. I’d love to see it on the show but I don’t really watch TV. If anybody spots it let me know?
I’ve been on the new shipping label page for a few weeks and have not noticed a great difference until today. Today for the first time my SKU (custom label) appeared on my label page without me having to cut and paste it. FYI also a couple of days ago the SKU started showing up on the mobile app. eBay seems to have the crappiest feature rollouts of any website, but they are genuinely trying to improve things.
Probably. We don’t print from the app because we have android phones with a zebra wireless printer and they don’t play well together. I tried from a chromebook but got terrible print quality. People have said the chrome pdf plugin doesn’t handle print quality well on a zebra and I experienced that, although I have since learned a few things about settings that may have also contributed. I gave up trying to figure it out but might try it again. We don’t really use the mobile app for much due to the many limitations of the app and our phones (our cameras suck so we bought a camera). We mainly use it to show each other what we sold and responding to customer questions when we’re out sourcing. I also would like to use it when I’m finding my items in my storage unit. I usually print the labels with the sku but sometimes I sell something when I’m at the storage unit it would be convenient to have the sku right there in the app. Of course I could log into the full site on my chrome browser and get the sku that way but it’s inconvenient on a little screen. The good news is if you have a really nice iPhone you probably could do everything from your phone now.
Holy crap guys! My gf just sold an item in her store, and when she looked at it on the app it showed the customer label!!!!!! It only took them how long? A couple of years?
Congratulations on your main street commercial property purchase. Are you guys keeping the intended use a secret, or do you really not know what you are going to do with the downstairs? Are you hoping to lease it out to a business, or run a business yourself? I would suggest you open an art theater to play independent movies and foreign films if you really want to invigorate the local economy. Or if not a full theater, then play stuff anyway. The local donut place downtown plays old sci fi serials (public domain stuff like b&w buck rogers) in the seating area. One of the brewpubs plays kung fu movies. Or if that’s too much money and time, then one thing that might be cool no matter what you do with it is to invite local artists to display their artwork on the walls. Our town (and lots of other town around here) have a monthly art walk where all the downtown businesses get involved. Bars, restaurants, even hair salons have a different artist every month. The local business association gets behind it and it draws people into town for the evening.
Also, what’s the parking situation? Jay could park his food truck there on the weekends.
