4 Essential Strategies to Make Poshmark Sales
I received some messages from Poshmark users the other day. One woman said she works on her business 20 hours a week but only makes $50 in sales. Another seller asked what’s the secret to selling because she wasn’t getting the sales she wanted.
I’ve written in the past about the inventory side of selling:
Sell what people most want to buy
Price your items competitively
Put brand, style, color, and size in listing titles
Take the best pictures you can to showcase your items
Today I want to cover the marketing and promotional side of selling with these four essential strategies to make more sales.
Disclosure: This post contains affiliate links. This means that I may receive compensation when you click on a product link or purchase an item linked on this site. Click here for details.
** If you don’t have a Poshmark account, you can receive a free $10 bonus when you sign up with my code SFGIRL2015.
** On Mercari, you can get $10 when you sign up with the code JENMHM.
1 | Self-shares before community shares
Sharing is a key feature of Poshmark. Users spend a lot of time sharing listings to followers and parties hoping to make sales. Poshmark promotes doing this too.
You feel good when you share because you help others publicize their listings and hopefully they return the favor sharing yours. Sharing other people’s listings is called community shares.
Self-shares are when you share your own listings. This is much more impactful than community shares for getting likes for your item and sales. When you share other people’s listings, there’s no guarantee they’re going to share yours back.
When you share your own listings, they’re always shared or publicized. I bet you only have so much time in the day to spend on Poshmark, so you want to make every share count. If you’re going to share any items, share your own first.
Some major sellers share their closets several times a day resulting in thousands of self-shares a month. There’s even a whole business around Poshmark virtual assistants (allowed) and the use of bots (not allowed) just to share listings!
I do appreciate that other sellers share my listings, so I set aside time every 1-2 weeks to return shares. I go down the list of people who have shared my listings and share some of theirs back. I don’t focus on 1:1 sharing. Someone may share 5 or 20 of my listings, and I’ll share 10 of theirs in return.
Share your own listings first, then share others.
2 | Use the discount features
Poshmark has several features to offer discounts to potential buyers because buyers love deals!
- Offer to likers
This is when you offer a private discount to people who have liked your listing. As of this writing, when you make an offer to likers, you have to also provide a shipping discount. So instead of the buyer paying $7.11 for shipping, they would pay $4.99 or nothing at all. You would cover that difference in the shipping cost.
I use this feature frequently, and it does lead to sales. Some sellers will send an offer out right after they notice someone has liked an item. I think anytime soon after the like to the day after is best because a potential buyer is likely to still be interested in the item. It may be on their mind or they might still be comparison shopping and buy yours with the discount you’re offering.
- Bundle items for people and make an offer
People can either bundle items themselves or you can bundle the items for them. They can be one or more items. Once a bundle is created, you can offer a discount of any amount you’d like. It’s not required to offer a shipping discount although that is a selling point for buyers.
When I notice that someone has liked several of my items, I’ll create a bundle for them and leave a nice comment. I say that I bundled all their likes for them and am open to offers. Sometimes I make the offer first if it’s an item I really want sold.
- Closet Clear Out
Poshmark has been holding Closet Clear Out (CCO) events 1-2 times a week in recent months. Drop prices of your items by at least 10% from their lowest historical prices. The purchase price has to be at least $10. This will trigger discounted shipping usually $3.99 or $4.99 instead of $7.11. Poshmark covers the difference in cost. Yippee!
On CCO days, I drop the prices of my items once in the morning. If no one has purchased the item after six hours and I have time for it, I lower the prices one more time in the afternoon or evening. That’s usually the lowest price I want to accept for an item.
I do a little cheer and package up the items that sell. For the items that don’t sell, I move on to the next tip, which is to relist items.
3 | Relist items
Relisting is a key strategy to raise the starting price of your items and get them seen by new potential buyers. If you’ve lowered an item from $50 to $30 for Closet Clear Out or while making offers to likers, and no one has bought it, go ahead and relist the item for $50.
Then share the listing over the next few days to gain likes. Make offers to likers when you can and/or lower the price of the item during the next Closet Clear Out.
Relisting can take time a lot of time. Some ways to make it go faster:
Have your item’s pictures stored on your phone, computer, or cloud. That way when you go to relist, you can quickly find them and drop them in the listing.
Copy and paste your titles and descriptions.
Batch your relisting so you do many at once.
Use the Poshmark Copy feature. This only relists items as new if your listings were very old. I don’t have an exact age for old.
Pay for a service like Vendoo or List Perfectly to manage your listings. They have faster delisting and relisting capabilities.
You can read more about relisting in this post.
4 | Sell on multiple marketplaces
This tip isn’t specific to Poshmark, but it’s necessary if you want to make more sales. When you sell on multiple marketplaces, you reach more potential buyers.
I sell on Poshmark, Mercari, and eBay. I have a few listings up on Depop and Kidizen as well to try them out.
Poshmark tends to favor trendier items. Kidizen specializes primarily in children’s clothing. You can sell children’s clothing on Poshmark and women’s clothing on Kidizen, but you’re less likely to makes sales.
I’ve sold very few children’s items on Poshmark and no women’s clothes on Kidizen. That makes sense given who shops on those marketplaces.
These are the most common places I hear of for crosslisting items:
Mercari
eBay
Kidizen
Curtsy
Etsy
Instagram
Facebook Marketplace
depop
Their own online store (via Shopify and similar commerce platforms)
Those are just some of the many places to sell your items. Crosslisting to other platforms does take time, but it’s worth it if you can minimize the amount of time it takes to do it and it brings in more sales.
There are several companies that provide crosslisting and/or relisting services:
Vendoo - you can read my Vendoo review.
Similar to relisting, it helps if you have your item’s pictures and description stored or ready to copy and paste. Some people use a paid service, which saves even more time.
It might seem confusing or time-consuming to manage more than one platform, but when the sales pick up, you won’t want to go back to just one!
This is how my sales broke down last month:
Poshmark: 47.3%
Mercari: 16.7%
eBay: 36%
I doubt I would have sold as much as I did if I had only listed my items to only one marketplace.
So there you have it – my selling strategy in a nutshell. This is exactly what I tell people when they ask me how to use Poshmark. It’s just these four strategies. If you haven’t been doing these things, give it a try and see where it takes you.
Have you tried any of the above strategies? What tips do you have for making Poshmark (and other online) sales?
