Posh Shows lets sellers go live and sell items in fast-paced auctions, where they set the starting price and duration and can quickly move through up to 50 items. Courtesy
Got a camera and a closet?
Poshmark has launched Posh Shows, a live shopping feature designed for resale that enables users to livestream on the Poshmark app for the first time to the 100 million user community.
“Our vision is that [with] Posh Shows, anyone with a closet and a phone can go live,” Tracy Sun, co-founder and senior vice president of seller experience at Poshmark, said. “Live streaming as a selling format goes hand-in-hand with resale. You have so many brands from so many seasons, and that depth and breadth of inventory available to sell is so vast that the magic of what Poshers can do is curate [their] items in a very meaningful way for their viewers.”
Here’s how it works: Poshmark sellers go to their “closet” within the app and utilize the My Seller Tools feature. Then select My Posh Shows and tap “Create.” Users can add details to entice buyers, like cover shots, tags and descriptions of what to expect during the event, which can be as long as they choose. Sellers can add up to 50 listings, but the items need to be listed preemptively. All items are sold via auction with a minimum starting bid of $3. The company said it wants to offer an experience that captures the fun and energy like shopping with friends via its app. Leaning into the brand’s community-centric ethos, sellers can also promote other Posher’s closets during their live shows by requesting to auction with the account.
“With Posh Shows, we are reinventing fashion resale for the next decade,” Manish Chandra, founder and CEO of Poshmark, said. “Poshmark was designed from day one to create a shopping experience built around community and real-time social interactions, making it the ideal destination for live commerce. Since we began testing, our community has embraced this interactive and fun approach to shopping, energizing our marketplace, transforming the experience on Poshmark and strengthening the human connections that are the foundation of our business.”
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Posh Shows lets sellers go live and sell items in fast-paced auctions, where they set the starting price and duration and can quickly move through up to 50 items. Courtesy
The resale marketplace began beta testing Posh Shows in the fourth quarter of 2022. Since then, sellers have hosted more than 100,000 shows and shoppers have placed more than four million bids in live auctions.
During the beta testing, some sellers saw promising results. One Posher, @emrayge, reportedly earned more than $6,000 per month with Posh Shows. A duo with the handle @dealsonstyle sold more than 1,300 items in three months thanks to going live. Other users, like @shoplinabtq and @mediabymedina, are full-time resellers leveraging Posh Shows to promote plus-size friendly vintage gear and support female entrepreneurship.
“We saw a huge gap in live commerce in the U.S.—the need for a platform that could help anyone be successful with live selling by making it incredibly simple and fun,” Sun said. “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.”
The company said it will add new features to Posh Shows in the coming months, focusing on creating new ways to “sell together” and inspiring new ways to shop and connect. New hosts are invited to join Posh Shows on a first-come, first-served basis as Poshmark’s community of sellers grows.
Livestream shopping is projected to generate $480 billion in China this year, according to eMarketer, which also estimated that it will make up 19.4 percent of e-commerce sales. China’s livestream-selling market grew from $3 billion (2017) to $171 billion (2020) in just three years, McKinsey found. In the United States, however, Coresight Research predicted the livestreaming marketplace will reach $25 billion and triple to an estimated $68 billion by 2026. But with heavy hitters like Amazon and TikTok joining the bandwagon, that number may change—potentially proving that livestream shopping is more than just a lingering pandemic-fueled fad.
Fashion is an easy-to-guess vertical for livestream shopping, and brands took advantage of this in 2021. Alibaba was ahead of the curve, promoting “See Now, Buy Now” during Singles’ Day in 2017 as its latest innovation. And in 2019, the Tmall-parent achieved record-high sales during its “6.18 Mid-Year Shopping Festival,” with brand-led livestreaming growing by more than 120 percent over last year. Roughly 1.3 million viewers joined Tmall’s 2022 11.11 livestream event.
Pinterest unveiled Pinterest TV, a series of live, original and shoppable episodes featuring existing creators, in November 2021, with products from brands like Allbirds and Outdoor Voices dropping in a live shopping setting every Friday afternoon.
Meta sunsetted its live shopping feature last summer after experimenting with it for four years as “consumers’ viewing behaviors are shifting to short-form video,” Facebook said in a company blog post at the time. While many brands relied on Facebook for streaming, bigger box retailers like Macy’s and Nordstrom focused their efforts on in-house live shopping features.
Poshmark isn’t losing sleep over being a little late to the game, though.
“We’ve been watching the livestreaming space for years now, more so the success that we’re seeing in Asia that’s been around for some time and then more recently in the U.S., and it’s always been a really intriguing format for us because it really enables sellers to form strong bonds with their shoppers, which is something that’s very much a core Poshmark tenant,” Sun said. “But one of the things that prevented us from jumping in sooner is this idea that it’s just celebrities or influencers and [that] not everybody can participate. So as we started to develop the idea internally, we really developed this perspective where we believe everybody can go live.”