Dive Brief:
- Poshmark introduced Posh Shows, its live shopping feature, in the U.S. and Canada, the company announced on Wednesday.
- In addition to showcasing products, Posh Shows lets users create a product listing via its Quick List feature, ship merchandise via its PoshPost service and tag descriptions of their show via Show Tags. Posh Shows also offers a Sell Together feature, which enables hosts to auction items from others’ closets.
- After piloting Posh Shows in Q4 2022, sellers on the platform have hosted more than 100,000 shows, during which shoppers have made more than 4 million bids in live auctions. The company said it plans to add more features to Posh Shows in the upcoming months.
Dive Insight:
So far, Poshmark is soliciting more sellers to become Posh Shows hosts in the U.S. and Canada. In the announcement, the company said it has grown to more than 100 million users and has generated more than $8 billion in gross merchandise volume since its founding in 2011.
“With Posh Shows, we are reinventing fashion resale for the next decade,” Manish Chandra, founder and CEO of Poshmark, said in a statement. “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.”
Poshmark joins a growing list of brands, retailers and social platforms experimenting with livestream shopping, including Adore Me, Maybelline and Best Buy. But as more brands and retailers jumped into livestream shopping, Meta discontinued livestream shopping on Facebook last October.
As Poshmark and other companies venture into livestream shopping, it remains to be seen whether the industry will gain ground among U.S. consumers. A March Coresight Research report projects that the U.S. livestream shopping market will reach $31.7 billion in 2023 and will grow to $67.8 billion in 2026. However, a December Morning Consult report found that 78% of survey respondents said they hadn’t taken part in a livestream shopping event.
Poshmark has undergone some significant changes in recent months. In January, Naver closed the acquisition of Poshmark for $1.2 billion. The following month, the company laid off less than 2% of its staffers across its finance, accounting, human resources and other departments.
