Shopper Experience
07 April
Poshmark debuts live shopping for resale
Posh Shows features an auction format, and is designed for social selling.
Photo by Amanda Vick on Unsplash
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Poshmark is bringing secondhand goods to livestream shopping, providing a way for secondhand apparel to go straight from a closet to an internet auction.
The news: Fashion-focused resale marketplace Poshmark rolled out its first live shopping feature that allows sellers to conduct auctions for secondhand items on video. Available in the U.S. and Canada, Posh Shows aims to make selling “simple and social” on a platform that has a community of 100 million people.
What are the features? Poshmark detailed the following:
Auctions: Sellers go live and conduct auctions to sell items. They can set the pace, and Posh Shows offers tools for real-time communication.
Go live now: Posh Shows is designed to make it easy to get started. A feature called Quick List allows people to list and go live “on the fly,” according to Poshmark. Hosts can tap Poshmark’s shipping service, payment options, customer support and authentication services.
Merchandising and discovery tools are designed to match sellers and buyers. Hosts can also add Show Tags to make their auctions more discoverable.
Sell Together is a feature that allows hosts to auction items from other people’s closets. This means that sellers can also curate their shows. “This community-based approach fuels a continuous growth engine that allows every seller to succeed, bolstering social connections and scaling the live shopping experience to everyone,” Poshmark said.
How’s it going so far? Launched internally to Poshmark in the fourth quarter of 2022, Posh Shows has already hosted more than 100,000 sessions, and buyers have placed 4 million bids. The early interest demonstrates the potential for live commerce to move into resale.
Key quote from Poshmark CEO Manish Chandra: “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."
What it says about ecommerce
Going live: Will live shopping take off in the U.S., like it did in China? That’s now the question at the heart of every new launch and piece of news about livestreaming. Both sides have a point:, Facebook and Instagram each shut down live shopping features in the last six months, while YouTube and TikTok appear to be embracing the format. Even so, there have been a steady stream of rollouts for new live shopping features, from eBay’s collectibles-focused platform to the new QVC owner-backed app sune. Poshmark’s rollout demonstrates that platforms still see promise in a format that allows sellers to directly interact with shoppers.
Live resale: Posh Shows is worth watching because the format is unique from other livestreaming features we’ve seen. The focus on resale items is novel. It means live shopping is now a way to sell one-of-a-kind items that are often difficult to photograph and merchandise with still imagery. It helps that the resale market is expected to grow to $70 billion by 2027, driven by Gen Z and an inflation-era consumer desire to stretch dollars, according to thredUP.
On the block: Selling items in an auction format also adds urgency, which is a key to success of a live shopping session, experts have told The Current. With the ability to sell from other people’s closets, Poshmark is also aiming to create a format where it’s easy for sellers to tap into the feature, even if they don’t go live themselves. One indicator of success will be if star hosts emerge. In a medium that prizes social interaction, personalities matter just as much as the technology that makes it easy to sell.Subscribe to The Current Newsletter
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May 10, 2023
Economy
30 May
Consumer confidence falls to 6-month low in May
Still, plans to buy big-ticket items ticked up.
“Deterioration.” “Gloomy.”
Those were a couple of the words used to describe consumer confidence in May. The Conference Board reported that the index fell to a six-month low amid debt ceiling anxiety and increasing concerns about employment.
“Consumer confidence declined in May as consumers’ view of current conditions became somewhat less upbeat while their expectations remained gloomy,” said Ataman Ozyildirim, senior director of economics at the Conference Board, in a statement. “...While consumer confidence has fallen across all age and income categories over the past three months, May’s decline reflects a particularly notable worsening in the outlook among consumers over 55 years of age.”
The dip among those over 55 came as Congress negotiated a deal over increasing the debt ceiling that included talk of cuts to programs such as social security and Medicare. While officials reached an agreement over Memorial Day weekend, the Conference Board’s survey was fielded prior to that date.
The job picture appears to be more anecdotally cloudy, as the number of consumers reporting jobs as “plentiful” fell to four percentage points to 43.5%. The job market has been consistently robust for nearly three years, as unemployment remains near historic lows. In April, the economy added 253,000 jobs, which remained a positive sign despite being below the gains of prior months. The confidence reading comes ahead of fresh data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics on Friday.
Despite the declines, there were signs that consumers are not completely pulling back on big-ticket items. Plans to buy big-ticket items such as cars and appliances ticked up on a monthly basis. It’s worth watching whether this extends to providing resilience in other discretionary categories, which have seen a pullback in early 2023.
Nevertheless, the index offered another sign that the consumer mood is getting more pessimistic. It was the fourth time in five months that confidence fell. On Friday, the University of Michigan offered another with a consumer sentiment report that showed a 7% dip.
Brands and retailers must work to reach consumers that are increasingly in less of a buying mood than the month before.
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