Making Six Figures With Poshmark

Regina Franklin owned a brick and mortar fashion boutique before the pandemic. When Covid shut down in-person retail, she turned to Poshmark. She’s now making six figures with Poshmark, and feels like she’s just getting started.

“I am going to make a million a year on this app one day,” says Franklin.

Poshmark is an online retailer that encourages potential sellers to set up personal “closets,” where customers can browse and follow their favorite sellers. With a combination of seller-friendly rules and easy social media integration, Poshmark has managed to differentiate itself from other peer-to-peer sales sites, such as Mercari, and TheRealReal.

Making six figures with Poshmark

What makes Poshmark so attractive? Several things make it work well for sellers of women’s clothing, like Franklin.

First, the site doesn’t attempt to sell everything to everyone. Focusing mainly on fashion and notions — purses, shoes, makeup and housewares — Poshmark gets only a fraction of the traffic pulled in by eBay, which sells everything from industrial equipment to books. But, because the site specializes, nearly all of Poshmark’s customers are looking for the type of items that Franklin sells.

Moreover, where there are more buyers on eBay, there are also more sellers. And that heavy competition makes it tougher for sellers to make their goods stand out.

Collaborate vs. compete

A Poshmark spokeswoman says the site itself also engenders collaboration rather than competition.

Sellers are encouraged to share and “like” other seller’s closets and comment on their listings. By doing this, buyers of particular types of clothing — whether designer or athletic — are more likely to find other sellers with a similar sense of style. Sellers also can organize local meet-ups and classes within the community. Poshmark also hosts an annual get-together called PoshFest, which brings together hundreds of resellers from across the country to learn how to scale their businesses on the platform.

Ease of use

However, Franklin says that a lot of what makes Poshmark work for her is the ease of listing her items for sale.

While she’s sold clothing on both Mercari and eBay, she says it takes her a fraction of the time to list her items on Poshmark. That’s partly just because Poshmark limits the type of items for sale, thus you have fewer boxes to tick and fewer choices when it comes to choosing keywords and descriptions for your products.

“I can do 10 listings on Poshmark in the same amount of time it takes to do one on eBay,” says Franklin.

This also makes the site a popular choice for casual sellers — people who simply want to clean out their closets of nice, but neglected fashion. Indeed, Franklin says she used the site to sell her personal items before she turned to the site to aid her professional selling career.

“I made $17,000 selling my personal items,” she says. “That wasn’t reselling like I do now. That was just selling my personal stuff.”

Live auctions

Franklin is also finding great success by participating in Poshmark’s live auctions. The site launched live auctions last year, following eBay’s foray into live auctions the year before. Since then, Poshmark’s sellers have hosted 1 million live shows, selling billions in merchandise.

Franklin says that in her first four months of hosting live auctions, she sold $83,000 worth of merchandise. However, she takes varying approaches to selling at these events, she says.

In some cases, she has an abundance of the same item in multiple sizes. When that’s the case, she’ll tell buyers not to bid up the price — everything goes for a set amount. But when an item is scarce, she’ll let buyers determine who wants it the most by hiking their bids.

“I may have a $180 dress. And I am going to start it at $12 and let’s see what we do,” she says. “But, I might also have all of these athletic tights and I’ll tell customers ‘Don’t bid it up. The price is $20 on the screen, but we are doing this sale for $12.’”

She sells hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of merchandize each year. After accounting for her cost of goods and labor last year, she says she cleared $125,000 in profit. The live shows were a key element in making six figures with Poshmark, she adds.

Sellers interested in live selling have access to ongoing support and tips via Poshmark-led webinars and experiential events to educate, explain, and demo key features, a site spokeswoman says. These educational sessions cover Co-hosting, where sellers can invite another seller to join remotely via video; Share Shows, which enable hosts to sell listings for other sellers; and Quick List, where hosts can create listings in real time.