What Is The Future For Poshmark? A Review Of My Brief User Experience

Poshmark was initially started in Texas in 2011 as a type of online garage sale. Over the next decade the concept grew Internationally, and sales were booming, as thousands of regular people caught onto the idea, and began to sell used items online to earn extra cash. It created a platform for both buyers and sellers. 

In 2022 the company was purchased by the Korean conglomerate Naver for 1.2 billion dollars. By 2023 Poshmark operations were dropped in India, UK and Australia. 

In addition to those setbacks, there were widely publicized cases of fraud, the reselling of stolen items, and unstable stock predictions.

A quick Google search states there is an 80% chance of impending financial distress for the company. However in some countries the sales are still fairly strong.

From personal experience, although I steer clear of EBay and Etsy due to the many reports of fraud, unshipped items etc. I decided to give Poshmark a try a few months ago. 

After buying some items on Poshmark, I will share my own experiences or review, and explain why I quit shopping, or perusing, or buying anything else from the Canadian Poshmark site. One of the limitations of Poshmark, is that you can only buy within your own country. 

On the up side, there are some good products, and honest sellers, as well as some good bargains to be found.

But to find a bargain, it is very time consuming and frustrating, so it is not all that enjoyable, mostly because of the way the website is designed, combined with a high percentage of blurry product photos. 

Overall, I found the website to be poorly designed for such a large organization with a high volume of products listed.

You have to scroll endlessly through hundreds and hundreds of items. When you do find something of interest and click on it, you are back to square one. You cannot backspace to where you left off.

In addition, there are multiple repeat images sprinkled throughout page after page. Not only are you forced to look at all those items you have no interest in once, but several times.

Once you click on something to get a closer look, to get back to get to where you were, you have to scroll through all the same stuff you just bypassed. It is especially frustrating if you click on something that does not have decent product photos. 

To circumvent this time consuming annoyance, you can simply click the like button if you see something of interest. This separates the things you are interested in, into a list that you can go and check out later. However, the problem with this method, is that you immediately get hundreds of spam emails on everything you clicked the like button on. 

A percentage of sellers have very poor quality photographs, and may have only one or two photos, even if they are listing the item for $200 or more.

Worse yet, some of them will take stock photos off another website, and use those photos to advertise the used item they are selling. They use a photo that is not only someone else’s photo, but also one that is not a true reflection on what they are selling. They will also copy and paste the product description of the item instead of writing it themselves.

All sellers should be aware of copyright laws. They should post images of what they are actually selling, as well as write their own product descriptions. Some of them will add a disclaimer to let you know it is a “copy and paste” but I don’t think that is a good business practice either. 

I can definitely attest to the fact that photography is very time consuming. One of the things I repeatedly tell myself is “don’t be lazy”. Even so, it is a challenge to get the noise out of the background, and to get clear, crisp shots, bypass glare, etc. as an amateur photographer.

Setting up an online store is not something you do in a week, if you want to do it well. Out of thousands of product photos, and blog photos, I think I might have two photos on the entire website that I did not take myself. In those cases, I make it very clear who took the photo.

One of the photos I could not resist using in a blog post about antique embroidered piano shawls, is a picture of Raquel Welch wearing a piano shawl, and a turquoise squash blossom necklace. It was taken when she was at the peak of her stunning beauty, and is an outstanding photo. 

Otherwise all of the photos on my website, are photos I took myself. The same goes for all written material. You cannot take someone else’s writing and claim it as your own either.

Even when doing research, you have to read about things, get a general idea, write down dates, and other relevant information, and then extrapolate from that how you want to present it. If you do take direct quotes, they are put in quotation marks, and attributed to the source.

There is another well-known vintage website, where a person took credit for, and placed her own copyright symbol, name and logo, in large lettering on multiple famous vintage fashion shots. She plastered her information pretending to be the artist, and falsely copyrighted the photographs, forbidding anyone else to use them! It is beyond brazen. 

She seemed to think she could take ownership of the copyrighted work of someone else, because she “found them on the Internet”. She also seemed to believe that searching for images, is akin to beach combing.

Copyright laws are very important, and not to be messed with. It is another form of theft and fraud, with stiff penalties for those who violate those laws.

Even for images, or works of art that do not have the copyright label printed on them – they are copyrighted anyway. You cannot steal someone else’s work. It is not hard to prove, especially for things published online, where the original came from. 

Although it is not okay to steal or claim ownership of anyone’s photographs, or art, this person had the audacity to claim ownership of photographs that were taken by famous photographers, and published in magazines like Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar. 

People should be made aware – they can get into serious trouble for stealing someone else’s work. 

There are some sellers on Poshmark who post good photos, but for the most part, there are a lot of very haphazard, poor quality, unedited photographs, as well as the practice of showing new images of old products.

It is very misleading when someone is selling a ten year old Canada Goose coat for $1200, and they simply take their information off the Canada Goose website, depicting a brand new coat. 

If you do find a seller who has good photography, and products – good luck if you can ever find them again. You cannot just type their user name into the address bar. In fact, I could never re-locate a good Poshmark store once I did find one. 

Probably one of the main issues that caused me to swear off shopping on Poshmark, is the lack of any kind of refund policy.

Some of the items are very expensive, with many items listed for several hundred, or even several thousand dollars.

The ultimate pet peeve for me, was that as a buyer, if you make an offer on something, and the offer is accepted, it is binding. There is no turning back. You cannot change your mind, even if you realize the item is not what you thought it was.  

However, if the seller changes his or her mind after accepting an offer, it is not binding for them. They simply do not ship the item, and will not respond to any messages you send them.

In this case, it is the only time you will get a refund. However, even if the seller is not acting in good faith, and refuses to answer an enquiry about why it has not been shipped, you still have to wait it out.

Then after a week or so, you will get an email from Poshmark, telling you they have contacted the seller about the fact it has not been shipped. So at least they keep tabs on whether or not something is actually being shipped. 

There is an eight day wait period without it being shipped, and then another ten days to process the refund.

Although I never bought anything expensive, I found this to be unfair. If the offer is binding for the buyer, it should work both ways.

The seller does have the option to reject an offer if they want to. They should not be able to simply ignore a binding agreement once an item is bought and paid for.

I think the reason they do it, is because they get a better offer. But once a person agrees to a price, and the item is paid for, the buyer owns it. It is up to the seller to get the item sent out, because they no longer own that item. 

What if a person paid $1000 for an outfit for a special occasion, or a coat they wanted to take on a trip? It means their money is tied up for almost three weeks, when there is no intention on the part of the seller to ship the item. 

Although I did not buy anything expensive, after sellers failed to ship a couple of times – I decided I was done with Poshmark. I was getting way too many spam emails as well, which I wanted to stop.

For those who are selling brand new items on the Poshmark platform, I wondered where they came from, and if they might be stolen goods. As it turns out, some sellers on Poshmark have been busted for selling stolen goods.

The final annoyance was when I tried to delete the account, Poshmark would not accept my decision to delete the account.

There was a popup informing me the account cannot be deleted, because there were outstanding offers, which was not true.

But to be sure the cache was cleared, I cleared my own cache, and then went back ten days later, well after their stipulated time lapse, and still got the same message. If they think this type of thing will increase customer loyalty, for me, it was just the opposite. 

So I deleted the payment methods, changed the address, changed the email address, removed all the likes, etc. I became even more determined to erase my existence on the site. 

Even after doing all that, they still sent spam emails. So I finally put a block on all emails from them. 

They have numerous marketing gimmicks, which I don’t fault them for, but I had no interest in them either. There were multiple invitations to Posh parties for everything under the sun.

There were constant messages to re-posh items. If you are not a seller, and have no interest in being a seller on Poshmark – why would you want to get messages to re-posh items? If I make a mistake on a non-refundable item, I donate it to the local thrift store, or to the homeless. 

But the one thing I found most annoying of all, was when out of the blue, some random person would announce they were “styling” me. Then I would get 467 indiscriminate items in an email that had been “chosen” just for me. Good grief. 

In all the millions of shoppers and products on Amazon, to their credit, they never spam people – or try to second guess what you might be interested in. They are smart enough to know people can shop for themselves. 

When I first got the messages telling me so and so was now styling me – I thought, what on earth does that mean? I did not ask anyone to style me.

Do they really think adults cannot figure out their own style? Plus how do they know who you are shopping for? Maybe you are looking for a dress for a teenage girl? Maybe a person is shopping for their aunt, best friend or grandmother. How do they know?

Poshmark may have been a trend with a rapid International incline at the onset, due to the interest in vintage, reselling, niche markets, quality second hand items that are no longer made, and so on. 

However, I do think they need to revamp their website into more user friendly categories so people can drill down to get to what they are interested in. I also believe they need to set some guidelines regarding photography, and ban the use of stock photos showing new items, when they are selling used. 

They need to realize not everyone wants to be spammed, or styled by some unknown random person. 

Another thing people should be aware of, is that even though some of the items look like thrift store items, they are not exactly thrift store prices. 

In the past ten years or so, those who go to thrift stores have seen some significant increases, especially when it comes to designer items, collectibles, sterling silver, and various other unique artisan things. But overall, there are still many bargains to be found in thrift stores.

However on Poshmark, if you buy something, even at the lowest end of what is listed, by the time shipping and all the other fees are added, a $20 item becomes a $50 item. 

It is too bad when collective, multi-vendor stores like Etsy and Poshmark have a few bad actors. They taint the waters for the majority, who are trying to set up a venue for selling things they have collected, taken care of, stored etc. 

In that large pool of sellers, there are some gems, and there are some sharks. I think it is up to the parent organization to sort them out, as well as to structure a more user friendly website. 

Otherwise, if they do not make the necessary improvements and safeguards, as well as limit the spam – in my opinion, they are not keeping up with the times.

Trends may seem like a hay day at first – but they can also be a flash in the pan.

Copyright Valerie J. Hayes and Quiet West (2024). Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author/owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Valerie J. Hayes and Quiet West with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.