So you’re doing it. You’ve decided to join one of the largest resale communities on the planet. Thanks to its IPO, Poshmark is poised for huge buyer and seller growth and has the resources to continuously improve. Let’s get into how to sell on Poshmark and make money doing it! Depending on your hustle, you’ll be well on your way to making anywhere from a few hundred dollars to five or even six figures! For the purpose of this article, we’ll focus on selling clothing, but you can follow this post as a guide to sell anything on their user friendly platform.
The Poshmark App…Or Their Website?
A best practice on how to sell on Poshmark is to first get familiar with the platform. There are two ways to use Poshmark, their app and their website. We’ve used their website in the past and it reminded us a lot of eBay. It’s easy to use, very intuitive and the instructions are short and sweet. The Poshmark app is the way most will choose to list because users don’t have to go back and forth between their mobile device and computer.
Download the Poshmark app for iOS or Android if you haven’t already.
After you download the app, you’ll be instructed to setup an account. They make it easy by offering two ways to get setup without manually filling in their signup form. Sign up via Facebook or Apple on iOS or through Facebook or Google on Android. If you’re ok signing up with your email, you can do that as well.
App Basics
The Poshmark app is organized like most apps are now days, with a navigation menu positioned at the bottom of the screen. You will access all features of the app from here, including listing, shopping and managing your profile. Below we go through the different navigation menus. If you’re only interested in how to sell on Poshmark, skip ahead to the Selling on Poshmark section.
Your Feed
This is the first screen you’re greeted with after you setup your account. It’s a bit reminiscent of Instagram. Depending on how you answered the preference questions during account setup, you’ll see a collection of sellers and their product offerings. Scrolling your feed and observing others is a great way to get accustomed to how you should photograph and describe items you wish to sell. If you want to jump right into some pro-tips, we recently shared a detailed article on tips for reselling clothing.
Trending Brands
As you scroll your feed, you’ll see collections from sellers that may be of interest to you as a buyer. As you start to follow other sellers, your feed will include items from them. An interesting point to note is Poshmark will display trending brands throughout your feed. These are brands that are hot sellers at the moment. Take note of these as you scroll. If you have items by those brands you wish to sell, or can source items by those brands, the chances are they’ll sell fast and for higher dollar amounts.
Recent News
Tap on the news icon and you’ll see a chronological list of news and updates with your store and other sellers. Poshmark is big on community and they’re one of the only resale platforms that provides sellers unique tools to be successful. One example of this is seller parties. Similar to selling Tupperware and Mary Kay in the 80’s and 90’s, you can have a party of Poshmark. The purpose of these parties is to gain exposure. So invite your friends, family and other sellers to explore and promote your collection.
Seller parties are just one of the ways to promote items you’re selling. We’ll get into other ways to promote your listings below.
The Poshmark Listing Process & What to Sell
After you get familiar with the Poshmark app, it’s time to list! Though there are strategies for choosing the right items from your closet if you want to make money and make it fast. You should steer away from spending a lot of time listing just any ol’ used item.
Choosing What To List
People get frustrated with reselling clothing because their items don’t sell quickly, or ever. This is more of a result of the individual not doing their homework or not knowing the “right” items to sell. One of the best tips for making money on Poshmark is know what’s in demand. If you’re listing items and brands no one is looking for, you’ll be well on your way to a frustrating resale experience. Trust us, don’t be this person.
A pro strategy for deciding the best items and brands to sell on Poshmark is to review the Poshmark Trend Report. This report is released each year and highlights buying trends. The report is detailed and provides a lot of great insight into customer buying habits. You may even want to bookmark it to refer back to every so often!
Take Quality Product Photos
A picture is worth 1,000 words. This is certainly the case with selling secondhand clothing. Buyers will want to know what’s up with the item you’re looking to sell and pictures are the way to do this. Take photos with the app or use a DSLR and upload them to your computer. You can choose to edit/retouch your photos for a better look, but it’s not necessary.
Natural light is your friend. Choose a place near a window or skylight, and not too early or late in the day. Poshmark allows you to take up to 12 photos, so use them. The more photos the better. Here are some photo taking tips:
- Take photos on solid color background, contrasting to the color of your item
- Use natural light
- Get as close as possible
- Hang clothing or lay it flat
- Take photos of any defects or tears
- If it’s a garment, take a photo of the items tag
Creating Item Descriptions
Spend time creating your product descriptions. This doesn’t mean spending hours coming up with the perfect words, but using the right keywords will help you sell faster.
Your listing title should include:
- Brand
- Style name (if possible)
Search engine optimization (SEO) is a big deal. It’s how Google knows what to show you when you search for something. Hence creating a quality description and title for your product will help it get found quicker. It could even show up in Google’s search results if you do it right.
Measurements
Measuring clothing is a pain, but it’s something all sellers must do regardless of the selling platform. With secondhand clothing, customers have no way of knowing how something will fit simply by knowing the tag size. This is because garments have been worn, washed and potentially altered throughout their life. Hence they’ll need to know important measurements. If you want to save time by not doing this manually, Tailored offers a simple web app (no need to download an app) that measures clothing by taking a photo with your phone. By snapping a photo of a garment, which you’ll be doing anyway, you’ll capture the important measurements in a matter of seconds.
If you prefer to measure manually, here are the areas on a garment you should measure and add to your listing. You can also check out our more detailed post on how to measure garments for reselling.
Tops/jackets
- Chest/bust (armpit to armpit)
- Neck seam to bottom opening
Jeans/trousers
- Waist
- Rise
- Inseam
Dresses
- Waist
- Hips
- Overall length (shoulder seam to bottom opening)
- Bust (armpit to armpit)
How To Price Your Used Clothes
Research! This is very important. Sure you can price your item for what ever price you want, but if it’s too high, it won’t sell. If it’s too low, you’ve left money on the table. As a guide, most items sell for 50% or less of the value they were new. Although one of our best pieces of advice, and a secret hack, is to check what recent items have sold for on Poshmark.
How to check prices of recently sold items
Start by going to the shopping tab on your app and select the brand you are looking to target. It will pull a feed of all the items listed under that brand. There you can see what other people are selling, how much they are selling them for and who is interested in those items.
Once you have the feed pulled up, click the funnel icon on the top right to access the filters. There, locate the availability menu and tap it to access the subcategory of sold items. Now the feed will only display sold items by the brand you chose. Want to sort the feed to see sold items closer to the item you wish to sell? Filter the list more by style of garment, size, color, etc.
Voila! A great way to ensure your product is priced appropriately to sell!
How To Sell Faster On Poshmark
If you opened a clothing store in the forest, would you get any customers? No. Unlike eBay, Poshmark is not a list and forget it platform. To sell your items faster, you need to be a bit active.
Share your store/listing
In addition to seller parties, sharing your listings often will push them to the top of the feed. There is no secret for the number of times you should share or what time of day. This will depend on you and your personal preference. The sweet spot for sellers seems to be sharing between 3-8 times per day.
There is no way to share your entire store/closet. Thus sharing is done on a per items basis. This is true for both general sharing (if you want the item to appear at the top of the feed) and during Posh Parties.
To share an individual item (put it at the top of the feed), first proceed to that item in your closet. Scroll to the bottom and tap the share button at lower right (as shown in the image at right).
Sharing On Posh Parties
You’ll start to notice each time you open the Poshmark app, you’ll be invited to a Posh Party. Parties are hosted multiple times per day, and you should consider joining.
If there is an item from your closet that is relevant to the particular party and you wish to share it, proceed to the item and tap the share button as you did above.
Click here for more information on Tailored’s instant garment measuring software. Happy selling!