A rapidly growing community of people passionate about fashion, Poshmark is an application for Apple and Android that allows registered members to buy and sell products from each other. Simple as it seems, selling, however, definitely takes time and effort on your part in order to get that extra jingle in your pocket. In today’s blog post, I’ll be going through my five tips for how to become a successful seller. By the way, at the bottom of this post, I have included a code that you can use to get $5 off your first purchase from Poshmark!
1. Follow, follow, and follow!
As Poshmark places heavy emphasis on its members and growing its community, it’s important to involve yourself in order to gain recognition and visibility. Whenever you check someone’s page, there’s always an option on the top right to “follow” that person in a similar fashion as you would for Instagram or Pinterest. Now, what if you don’t like that person’s sense of style or don’t find anything in their closet interesting? For me, I would follow anyways because if I really were to look for something to buy, I would search through the site rather than explore every individual person. In addition, when you follow someone, they will receive a notification of that follow, and they may check out your closet and perhaps buy something from you! Even if they don’t buy from you, they may share your items, another point that I’ll get to in point number two.
In this example, tapping the blue follow button changed the top right from “follow” to “following.” Since this posher (the affectionate name that people within the Poshmark community call each other) has 137k followers, you can use that as an advantage to follow a whole mass of other people. Below I have included two pictures detailing how easy it is to follow more people by tapping the area that has the number of followers that she has.
In my experience, people with more followers tend to be the ones getting the sales (unless you’re selling dirt cheap!) because of the huge network that they’ve developed. Much of this comes from first following other people, so now, I try to follow as many people as I can. Typically, around 25-50% of the people who you follow will follow you back, so you can be sure of being able to grow your base by following other people.
2. Share yours and other people’s items.
Taking on the likes of many other social media platforms out there, Poshmark allows users to share listings from their closet and from other people’s closets. Similar to following, when you share other people’s listings, they will receive a notification that will get notifications of people sharing my items, and I try to share their items as well. The biggest benefit of sharing listings is that all of your shares will appear in your followers’ feeds.
As you can see in the image to the left, this posher who I’m following shared one of their listings, and I saw that listing in my feed. The feed is similar to a Facebook newsfeed in which you get the latest updates from your followers. Now, if someone else shares your items, that share also gets broadcasted to all of their followers which is highly beneficial for exposure especially if that person has follower numbers in the thousands.
3. Update listings on a regular basis.
Really similar to sharing in respects of exposure, followers can also see in their feed when you update your items. By simply scrolling through my feed, I already saw multiple instances of people who updated their listings.
Besides increasing visibility for your listings, it’s also a good practice to have your listings updated since Posh always lists when you last update them. Many times, I find myself looking at products that were last updated months ago with unanswered comments which basically tell me that the person is probably not going to sell that item. By the way, you don’t actually need to update an item per say in order for the time stamp to change, you can either choose to edit the listing and publish as is or you can share your own listing to get it to be more recently updated.
4. Use high quality photos and descriptions that are to the point.
Often times, the people who have hundreds of thousands of followers have flawless photos in their listings. At this point, I almost assume that listings that contain stock images are being sold by very successful poshers. Of course, finding stock images of your old clothes is not always possible, so try your best to get high definition photos. Since you can only upload pictures and edit listings from the application itself, my suggestion would be to use an actual camera, snap photos with great lighting, send those photos to your phone by email, and then upload them to the listing.
Descriptions go hand in hand with your photos, so be clear with what you’re trying to convey with selling your product. Personally, I like to detail the perks of the product within a sentence or two first below bullet pointing additional features of my items. I have found that many successful poshers will use emojis as their bullet points in the description as it provides charming aesthetic qualities as well as a very neat layout of things potential buyers should know. Although, my one sentence description isn’t as catchy as it could have been, this scarf to the right sold within a day of listing!
5. Be friendly, polite, and respectful in all circumstances.
As mentioned before, Poshmark is a community of people with similar interests in fashion that relies on a lot of interaction between members. One of the interesting features of Poshmark is that there is no way for you to private message other poshers unless you comment your email address and they contact you through email or something. Simply put, if poshers have questions or concerns about your item, they will typically comment on your listing.
Whenever someone comments on my listing for the first time, I always make sure to tag them in my responding comment by typing @usernameofposher before welcoming them to my closet. By ensuring that they feel comfortable chatting with you, you increase the likelihood of them visiting your closet to purchase items in the future. As you can see from the conversation on the left, although I didn’t end up selling that item, I was still able to have a pleasant conversation.
And… that’s a wrap!
I realize this is a pretty long blog post (it took me quite a while to write!), and as a reward for reading through it or skipping to the end, you can get $5 off your first purchase from Poshmark if you sign up and enter my referral code: PPAOH. If you found this post helpful, please give it a like, and if you have any comments or questions, leave them down below so that I can get back to you as soon as possible. Even better, if you’re already on Poshmark and would like to get connected, follow me @ellesmuse!
Elle's Muse 