Poshmark Invests In Sellers With New Dedicated Team And Tools To Help Them Engage With Shoppers

Poshmark today unveiled at its Poshfest annual conference for its seller community new innovations and tools to help the small and large businesses on the social resale marketplace grow and scale. The company also named cofounder Tracy Sun to the new role of senior vice president of seller engagement.

“Team Posh is focused on investing in you,” CEO Manish Chandra told Poshfest participants this morning. The event is virtual for the second year due to the Covid-19 pandemic. “We’ve been innovating on the user experience, making it simple and easy for anyone to sell.”

Poshmark’s newly established seller experience team is focused on supporting and innovating for sellers at all levels, from casual sellers to larger boutiques and brands, to make sure that anyone who wants to sell on Poshmark can quickly and easily build a closet online, and, depending on their motivations, grow and scale over time.

“Sellers have always been and continue to be our number one priority,” Tracy Sun told me. “We’re growing the company and there’s more demands on our time. We formed the seller experience team to hold ourselves accountable to this seller-customer promise and to ensure that as we grow we have a team that’s staying as close to the customer as possible.

“This organization, we think will help us continue to innovate, continue to see and design and build for the diversity we’re seeing in our sellers today and ultimately help all our sellers whether they’re new or have been with us for over a decade. We’re committed to supporting all of them to continue to grow and thrive.”

Poshmark at the conference introduced two new tools to help sellers engage with shoppers. The My Shoppers tool is a virtual version of clienteling, a department and specialty store tactic where sales associates offer personalized service to clients by suggesting items to finish a look, offer styling advice or alerting them to new shipments of their favorite designers.

“My Shoppers is a tool that I’ve been thinking about for a very long time,” Sun said. “Think of your typical [brick and mortar] use case for clienteling. A customer walks into a store and a sales associate sees she’s checking out a new sweater she just put out on the floor. The associate will walk up and use the data she sees and use her judgment based on what she sees in front of her, engaging with the customer in a way that may convert that shopper to a buyer. 

“How do you take that online, when you can’t see what people browsing for and you can’t talk to every single person online,” Sun continued. “Our customers are looking at things through likes, through offers and through adding things to a bundle. These are all digital versions of looking at that sweater in the store. We’re taking that data and packaging it up for our sellers and making it really easy for our sellers to offer a clienteling experience to their prospects.”

The My Shoppers tool is available to all Poshmark sellers free of charge and enables sellers to apply the same, highly personalized experience online and at scale. With My Shoppers, sellers can first pinpoint, then close compelling leads with razor-like precision, all in one tool. It’s entirely backed by social commerce, so sellers can quickly and easily move through the sales funnel, sending, for example, promotional discounts or personalizing merchandise. The tool makes it seamless to engage with shoppers and turn them into buyers, Poshmark said.

My Closet Insights, a dynamic dashboard that provides sellers with real time inventory and sales data was also introduced at PoshFest. It allows sellers to easily and efficiently understand business performance over time to inform strategy, leverage relevant tools to drive action and improve sales.

“The thing about data is that it’s pretty useless on its own,” Sun said. “Where data comes to life is when you can pair it with insights and action. If you take My Closet Insights in conjunction with with My Shoppers’ clienteling, you’ll be able to see if you converted more people. Did I make more sales, did I help them add more pieces to their bundle or their cart and was I able to increase my ticket price. We’ll be giving them real time insights through the dashboard on any of the tools available today and in the future.”

 Sun said she’s planning to support the sellers on Poshmark that have grown rapidly into significant businesses. “They need more tools because they’ve gotten so big,” she said. “Maybe they have a team that’s working with them, maybe they have inventory that’s gotten so large they don’t know how to manage it. There are a lot of on enterprise level tools.

“We’re also not forgetting those who are new to retail,” Sun said. “That’s the bread and butter of Poshmark. For some of them, reselling is very natural, and for some it’s new behavior. As we grow and as the industry grows and more and more people are coming to experience the sustainability of resale, I want to make sure that we help all these new sellers get started and be as successful as they can be.”

Poshmark had 4.5 million sellers as of December when it released its S1 and filed its prospectus for its IPO.  The company on January 14 went public, at a valuation of over $3 billion, listed on the Nasdaq Stock Market under the symbol POSH.

Last year, Poshmark’s community 6.2 million active users generated over 30 billion social interactions. “That doesn’t happen in a more sterile e-commerce experience. We have that vibrancy,” Sun said of social commerce. “We’re really focused on the person and empowering people.

“Other companies may focus on transactions. Of course that’s how we make money,” Sun said, “but we empower people to use new tools and experiment with new merchandising strategies The more we can innovate with our product to help them do these things faster, more efficiently and more effectively, the more they’ll win, and when they win, I’ll be very happy.”