Poshmark Introduces Posh Shows, Live Shopping For Resale

Leading fashion resale marketplace Poshmark today announced the launch of Posh Shows, live shopping powered by a vibrant community and real-time social experiences. Designed for fashion resale, the dynamic new way to shop and sell live on Poshmark is available in the U.S. and Canada.

Posh Shows allows sellers to live stream on Poshmark for the first time, leveraging the power of live video to sell items from their Poshmark closets and reach an established community of more than 100 million users.

Designed to make selling simple and social, Posh Shows has an easy-to-use interface and unique suite of selling tools. Posh Shows allows anyone to get started and make sales, while offering an experience that captures the fun and energy of shopping with friends. Fashion resellers regardless of the size of their closets or number of followers, can participate in Posh Shows, allowing sellers to succeed with just
just
a closet and a phone.

“When we conceptualized this product, our goal was a little different than what has happened in live shopping with QVC
QVCA
and HSN, but also in China and parts of Southeast Asia, where live shopping has become very big,” said Manish Chandra, CEO and cofounder. “The difference is rooted in three things: Anybody should be able to sell on the platform. We literally focused on enabling millions of people to participate as sellers.

“The early test results we’ve gotten, we have thousands of sellers testing it,” Chandra said. “It’s been super-easy for them to use. We’ve got fresh college graduates, 22-year-olds, who are using it to make money when they don’t have a full-time job, and then others who have been selling on Poshmark for a while, like a mom who has been working with Poshmark since she was a teenager, so very broad enablement on selling.

“Poshmark has always been focused on our seller community, our community of fashion resellers,” Chandra said. “When we think of Posh Shows, it enables that community to come together and sell together.

“Because we’re connecting millions of sellers to millions of shoppers, there needs to be very specific discovery agents,” Chandra said. “You have to find the show that fits your taste and style, because there’s literally thousands of shows happening at the same time, which is at a very different scale than what you see on QVC and HSN.

“Putting these things together, gives us a very different platform,” Chandra added. “It’s based on four principles: A very fast and simple format, but also a very fast-paced format, which involves bidding and auction, so people are participating in a very active way. Universal seller enablement, where sellers can sell and merchandise their own shows, and finally, and most importantly, the fact that all of this comes together in a way that allows the community to sell together,” Chandra told me.

The CEO said that the way this manifests itself is that sellers can sell items that are part o their inventory and part of their closets. “Let’s say there’s things you want to sell on your platform,” Chandra said. “Posh Shows also allows you to sell items from other sellers. Let’s say, Kelly said, ‘Hey, Manish, sell my skirt!’ She will handle the shipping, but I will offer it on my show.”

The early data is very encouraging, according to Chandra. “We’ve been testing it for a couple of quarters, it’s still very restricted in terms of who can try it. There’s really tremendous momentum.”

Chandra described the bidding process like this: “Let’s say I want to sell the shirt I’m wearing. I put it up and say, ‘Here’s an item,’ and I describe it, then I start the auction. I set a timer for 30 seconds or a minute. Then I set a price, the lowest price I would accept for the shirt.

“Quite quickly, depending on what the product is, it could rise to $40 bucks, it could rise to $50,” Chandra said. “The final bidder effectively purchases the shirt. Sometimes a bid can go on for a few minutes and allow the product to find its market value.”

Chandra said shoppers can engage in a dynamic, entertaining shopping experience, discovering products, communicating in real-time with sellers, and scoring deals on an endless variety of styles. It’s easy to start selling, and easy to earn money with Posh Shows.

The platform makes it simple for anyone to become a seller and start a live show with features such as Quick List, which remove the friction from live selling, allowing anyone to take an item, create a listing on the fly, and sell it live in seconds. Hosts benefit from Poshmark’s longtime focus on seller experience, from its simple, fast Posh Post shipping service, to robust payment options, customer support and authentication services.

Posh Shows has been built for discovery and exposure, Chandra said. “With a community of over 100 million style lovers, Poshmark is the ideal destination for fashion resellers to go live,” Chandra said. “Its powerful merchandising and discovery tools help match sellers to the right customers, and shoppers to the sellers, trends and brands that fit their interests.

“Hosts can add show tags to describe their show, connecting shoppers to the trends they’re looking for, from archival luxury to festival-season fashion. We’re optimizing discovery across the more than 6,000 brands, an extensive selection of merchandise on Poshmark,” Chandra added.

“This approach allows the products to find a market clearance price, kind of like how a stock exchange works,” Chandra said. “The seller has two points of control. They control the starting price and the second point of control is the duration of the auction. There’s a very good chance that it’s going to get sold, and it will be sold to the highest bidder.”

“It works well,” Chandra said. “I’ve seen auctions start at $4 and finish at $80 or $85. People have different ways of merchandising the auctions, from day-to-day items to luxury products like a Louis Vuitton handbag.

The great thing of this aspect of selling is it uses all of Poshmark’s core features,” Chandra said. “It uses our shipping system, Posh Post, it uses Posh Protect, which will refund the entire amount of the purchase if there are any problems with it. It uses the Posh authenticate system, which is our authentication system that’s built to the platform.

“It offers free authentication for items of $5 and more. If you’ve got a luxury brand or pair of shoes, it will go to our authentication center. We’ve already made many authentications through Posh Shows from that center. It allows us to validate every item that’s coming to you. Last year, we acquired Suede One, with the goal of offering authentication even for price points lower than $5. Once an item has been successfully purchased, it gets authenticated.

“We have over 100,000 shows that sellers have posted with more than 4 million bits and live options across a very wide selection at merchandise,” Chandra said. “We have a seller, Emily, who has seen her sales go to $6,000 a month in just a few short months of using Posh Shows. Lina, a recent college graduate is doing six figure sales and using Posh Shows as her full-time job. Jenea is selling upcycled jackets, shoes and paintings. We have several people using Posh Shows as their full-time income.”

The way we built this is pretty unique to Poshmark. It takes live selling and makes it live selling built around the community, where groups of sellers are coming together from their own homes and really selling together. That’s very powerful and very unique. It allows every item sold to be part of a community, as a collection of shows, a collection of shops, a collection of sellers.

Chandra said the platform relies on the infrastructure Poshmark has been building over the last 10 years. As you see it in action, it isn’t just about one seller selling millions of dollars of merchandise, it’s about thousands of sellers selling thousands of dollars of merchandise and generating millions of dollars together.

“We saw a huge gap in live commerce in the U.S., and the need for a platform that could help anyone be successful with live selling by making it incredibly simple and fun,” said Tracy Sun, cofounder and SVP Seller Experience at Poshmark. “The community reception has blown us away, and I’m excited for what’s ahead as we make Poshmark the number one place to shop and sell live.”

Poshmark will be adding new features to Posh Shows in the coming months, with a focus on creating new ways to sell together and inspiring new ways to shop and connect live, said Sun, adding, “New hosts are invited to join Posh Shows on a first come, first-serve basis as Poshmark continues to grow its community of sellers each week.

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