Regina Franklin owned a brick and mortar trend boutique earlier than the pandemic. When Covid shut down in-person retail, she turned to Poshmark. She’s now making six figures with Poshmark, and seems like she’s simply getting began.
“I’m going to make one million a yr on this app sooner or later,” says Franklin.
Poshmark is an internet retailer that encourages potential sellers to arrange private “closets,” the place clients can browse and observe their favourite sellers. With a mixture of seller-friendly guidelines and straightforward social media integration, Poshmark has managed to distinguish itself from different peer-to-peer gross sales websites, equivalent to Mercari, and TheRealReal.
Making six figures with Poshmark
What makes Poshmark so enticing? A number of issues make it work properly for sellers of ladies’s clothes, like Franklin.
First, the location doesn’t try and promote every thing to everybody. Focusing primarily on trend and notions — purses, sneakers, make-up and housewares — Poshmark will get solely a fraction of the visitors pulled in by eBay, which sells every thing from industrial gear to books. However, as a result of the location specializes, almost all of Poshmark’s clients are in search of the kind of objects that Franklin sells.
Furthermore, the place there are extra consumers on eBay, there are additionally extra sellers. And that heavy competitors makes it harder for sellers to make their items stand out.
Collaborate vs. compete
A Poshmark spokeswoman says the location itself additionally engenders collaboration slightly than competitors.
Sellers are inspired to share and “like” different vendor’s closets and touch upon their listings. By doing this, consumers of specific sorts of clothes — whether or not designer or athletic — usually tend to discover different sellers with the same sense of fashion. Sellers can also manage native meet-ups and lessons inside the group. Poshmark additionally hosts an annual get-together referred to as PoshFest, which brings collectively a whole bunch of resellers from throughout the nation to learn to scale their companies on the platform.
Ease of use
Nevertheless, Franklin says that a number of what makes Poshmark work for her is the benefit of itemizing her objects on the market.
Whereas she’s bought clothes on each Mercari and eBay, she says it takes her a fraction of the time to checklist her objects on Poshmark. That’s partly simply because Poshmark limits the kind of objects on the market, thus you’ve gotten fewer bins to tick and fewer selections on the subject of selecting key phrases and descriptions to your merchandise.
“I can do 10 listings on Poshmark in the identical period of time it takes to do one on eBay,” says Franklin.
This additionally makes the location a well-liked selection for informal sellers — individuals who merely wish to clear out their closets of good, however uncared for trend. Certainly, Franklin says she used the location to promote her private objects earlier than she turned to the location to help her skilled promoting profession.
“I made $17,000 promoting my private objects,” she says. “That wasn’t reselling like I do now. That was simply promoting my private stuff.”
Dwell auctions
Franklin can also be discovering nice success by collaborating in Poshmark’s reside auctions. The positioning launched reside auctions final yr, following eBay’s foray into reside auctions the yr earlier than. Since then, Poshmark’s sellers have hosted 1 million reside exhibits, promoting billions in merchandise.
Franklin says that in her first 4 months of internet hosting reside auctions, she bought $83,000 value of merchandise. Nevertheless, she takes various approaches to promoting at these occasions, she says.
In some instances, she has an abundance of the identical merchandise in a number of sizes. When that’s the case, she’ll inform consumers to not bid up the worth — every thing goes for a set quantity. However when an merchandise is scarce, she’ll let consumers decide who needs it probably the most by mountaineering their bids.
“I’ll have a $180 costume. And I’m going to start out it at $12 and let’s see what we do,” she says. “However, I may additionally have all of those athletic tights and I’ll inform clients ‘Don’t bid it up. The value is $20 on the display screen, however we’re doing this sale for $12.’”
She sells a whole bunch of hundreds of {dollars} value of merchandize annually. After accounting for her price of products and labor final yr, she says she cleared $125,000 in revenue. The reside exhibits had been a key aspect in making six figures with Poshmark, she provides.
Sellers excited by reside promoting have entry to ongoing assist and ideas through Poshmark-led webinars and experiential occasions to teach, clarify, and demo key options, a website spokeswoman says. These instructional classes cowl Co-hosting, the place sellers can invite one other vendor to affix remotely through video; Share Exhibits, which allow hosts to promote listings for different sellers; and Fast Checklist, the place hosts can create listings in actual time.
