What is this post about?
This post is a result of one-month long observation on the publicly available sale statistics on Poshmark. It attempts to shed some light on the current state of the platform and to pull out insights, for the benefit of people, who are just starting out. In particular it seeks to answer the following questions:
Ultimately, the post aims to provide a bird's eye view on Poshmark and hopefully help people to start on Poshmark on solid footing and to answer all encompassing question:
Where to Start and How to Start Selling Fast?
To answer this question, let’s start with category definitions. Poshmark groups items into 12 different categories:
- Jeans
- Swim
- Makeup
- Pants
- Intimates&Sleepwear
- Skirts
- Shoes
- Tops
- Jackets&Coats
- Jewelry
- Dresses
- Shorts
We will maintain this segmentation to make any reconciliation and further deep dives easier in the future. A quick forewarning: The data was gathered over a course of a month, so is unlikely to capture seasonal patterns. In addition it relies on publicly available data,which might not be representative of the actual Poshmark's sales data. The purpose of this post is to give an overview and (given enough interest) to kick start a series, which would explore other data driven insights, like trending items and highest grossing sub categories, so be sure to bookmark this site 😉. With that aside let's tackle the first question:
Where should a beginner start?
Perhaps uncoventionally, as a beginner, it is much easier and profitable to start your Poshmark journey in largest categories.
As of the date of this blog post, the competition on Poshmark is modest ( on that below ) and given the Poshmark is in part market place and in part social platform, the largest categories give you both the traffic to sell to and get your followers from. Yes, it would mean more competition outright, but it would also mean more traffic, which would lead to more sales vis-à-vis the smallest categories. According to statistics obtained the top three categories are outselling bottom three by 8 to 1!
So which categories had the most sales?
The leading category by sales volume is Shoes with 30,200 items sold in a month, followed by Jewellery 28,400 and Tops at 20,865. These top three categories account for 52% of all sales volume. So it is a good bet to carve out your niche in one of those sub categories and by growing your followers expand into other subcategories within those three top categories.
The average across all twelve categories is 12,500 items sold a month. Above this average and probably next in line categories to pick your niche in are Makeup, Pants and Dresses, with Intimates& Sleepware falling just below the average threshold.
The laggards in terms of volume are Short, Jacket&Coats and Skirts. Combined they represent only 6% of monthly sales volume. If you want to hit the road running fast, it is best to avoid them.
Now arguably, the juiciest part of the whole exercise – the average time it took an item to sell within each category.Or
What are the Fastest Selling Categories ?
The difference in time it takes to sell an item in top selling category vs the slowest selling category is over 38x. The fastest selling category is Jewellery at 1.8 hours to sell an item and the slowest is Skirts at over 70hrs to sell a garment.
As for the simple average time it takes to sell an item on Poshmark – it is currently at 18.5 hours. However, this metric is a bit misleading, as it’s being dragged down by a few outliers, most notably Skirts and Jackets&Coats.These two categories representing only 4% of total sales volume,with their times to sell of 70 and 43 hours respectively depress the overall time to sell.
To account for this disparity, we can weigh each category average by its respective share in overall sales volume, to arrive at the more realistic assessment of overall average time to sell. Such weighted overall average time to sell on Poshmark is only 10.10 hours.
Clearing this threshold (in addition to top 3 best selling categories) are Intimates&Sleepwear and Pants at 6.4 and 6.8 hours to sell on average.
Interestingly, Makeup category, while being top 4 in items sold is only at the ninth spot with average time to sell of 19.5 hours.
In the laggards’ camp there are no changes – Skirts, Jackets&Coats and Shorts have an atrocious time to sell over the observed period, with 70, 43 and 22 hours to sell on average. Please do note that data represents just a single month of observation and excludes seasonal patterns, such as very likely uptick in Short and Skirts sales as we had into summer. If you want to stay update on what sells and what is trending, please consider subscribing to our newsletter, below! 👇
Now onto the average sales price:
What is the Average Selling Price per Category?
The average sale price is important consideration for three reasons. First, it helps you to price your items in line with what market is willing to pay. Second, it helps to assess your potential gross profit on on your sourcing expeditions. Third, the higher the average price in absolute terms, the higher your dollar profit per sale, given the same % markup and the more leeway you have to offer dollar discounts.
The average sale price across all twelve categories is $28.
Jackets&Coats category despite absolutely bombing on other metrics, has the highest average price at $41.60, while all start Shoes category scored second with $39.20, closely followed by Dresses category at $38.70.
The other category clearing the overall average threshold is Jeans with $29.80 on the forth place.
It is worth to note that despite most of the categories falling below the overall average, the difference across the categories top and bottom category is small. The bottom category is Makeup with average sale price of $18.60, which is roughly half that of the top category. That means a couple of things.
First, it seems the $20-$40 range is really a sweet spot in pricing, keep that in mind on your next sourcing trips, if you want to sell your inventory fast. Secondly, the other two factors, namely time to sell and average number of items sold per category, would have a far more weight in your road to success. Meaning if you are starting out and want to sell on Poshmark fast you only need to focus on these three categories: Shoes, Jewellery and Tops with items priced around $20-$40 range.
Possible objection to this approach might be that those categories are being dominated by large players. Let's touch on this as well
How Big is Competition within each Catoegory?
The objection is not without certain merit,however the data shows that Poshmark as a platform is quite newcomer friendly, as top 20 largest sellers are taking up at most 16% of category turnover:
The average ratio of top 20 sellers across all categories is actually 10%. Notably, out of our top 3 categories only two are above the 10% average concentration ratio – Shoes with 14% and Jewellery at 12%, while Tops is only at 7%.
It is important to reiterate that despite the concentration ratio of those two being above the average, the absolute numbers across all categories are so low, that you should not really worry about competition and instead focus on sourcing great products at the right prices in those 3 categories as your first port of call!
TL;DR: If you want to start selling fast on Poshmark, focus on Shoes,Jewellery or Tops. Target the Sale price within $20-$40 range and don't be afraid of competition!
As a bonus for making this far, here are closet names of top sellers in their respective categories to draw your inspiration from:
