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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Operations
08 June
US imports expected to fall 22% in first half of 2023: NRF
Labor disputes on the West Coast could cause further disruption heading into peak season.
Photo by Venti Views on Unsplash
When the first half of 2023 is complete, imports are expected to dip 22% below last year.
That’s according to new data from the Global Port Tracker, which is compiled monthly by the National Retail Federation and Hackett Associates.
The decline has been building over the entire year, as imports dipped in the winter. With the spring, volume started to rebound. In April, the major ports handled 1.78 million Twenty-Foot Equivalent Units. That was an increase of 9.6% from March. Still it was a decline of 21.3% year over year – reflecting the record cargo hauled in over the spike in consumer demand of 2021 and the inventory glut 2022.
In 2023, consumer spending is remaining resilient with in a strong job market, despite the collision of inflation and interest rates. The economy remains different from pre-pandemic days, but shipping volumes are beginning to once again resemble the time before COVID-19.
“Economists and shipping lines increasingly wonder why the decline in container import demand is so much at odds with continuous growth in consumer demand,” said Hackett Associates Founder Ben Hackett, in a statement. “Import container shipments have returned the pre-pandemic levels seen in 2019 and appear likely to stay there for a while.”
Retailers and logistics professionals alike are looking to the second half of the year for a potential upswing. Peak shipping season occurs in the summer, which is in preparation for peak shopping season over the holidays.
Yet disruption could occur on the West Coast if labor issues can’t be settled. This week, ports from Los Angeles to Seattle reported closures and slowdowns as ongoing union disputes boil over, CNBC reported. NRF called on the Biden administration to intervene.
“Cargo volume is lower than last year but retailers are entering the busiest shipping season of the year bringing in holiday merchandise. The last thing retailers and other shippers need is ongoing disruption at the ports,” aid NRF Vice President for Supply Chain and Customs Policy Jonathan Gold said. “If labor and management can’t reach agreement and operate smoothly and efficiently, retailers will have no choice but to continue to take their cargo to East Coast and Gulf Coast gateways. We continue to urge the administration to step in and help the parties reach an agreement and end the disruptions so operations can return to normal. We’ve had enough unavoidable supply chain issues the past two years. This is not the time for one that can be avoided.”
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