Diving deeper into its social commerce reach, Poshmark is now expanding further into the home.
Starting today, consumers can now shop home goods from wallpaper to bedding on Poshmark’s Home Market. Instead of letting the items for sale float around the platform, Poshmark rolled the market into its own category as part of the company’s “market launches,” which group certain items into sections: women, men, luxury, kicks, prom, maternity, petite, plus-size, activewear, makeup, gifts, boutiques and wholesale.
“It covers everything people need for their apartment, their dorms especially, when you look at where the population is with mobility,” said Manish Chandra, founder and CEO of Poshmark.
Chandra said expanding into the home market was always on the company’s product road map, as consumers consistently listed home products on the platform by using the “other” tag. However, as Poshmark thought about how to incorporate home goods into the platform, the company needed to make sure the items still fit within Poshmark’s core functionalities, such as Posh Post (the company’s shipping component), and that the marketplace could handle it. That’s in part why Poshmark is focusing on smaller home decor pieces rather than selling couches or other larger home goods. Chandra expects the product selection to cross more than 100,000 items on the platform.
To ready the platform for the rollout, Poshmark started letting select sellers upload home goods on May 31. Chandra declined to share the exact number of sellers who participated in this initial rollout, but stated that about .1% to .2% of its 5 million sellers participated. Because of the social nature of the platform, Chandra said, there’s less of a chance that sellers will list items in poor condition (or worse, with bedbugs). The platform also includes buyer protection (Posh Protect), where the buyer always has the option to return something.
“When we started putting fashion online, people said this won’t happen, and very rarely do you see this behavior happening on the platform,” Chandra said. “We’ve actually built a highly effective system [and] there will be issues that I’m sure we’ll have to deal with. And as we confront them, we’ll develop policies and curation to handle those challenges.”
In November, Poshmark announced it raised a $8.75 million Series D. According to a report in the Wall Street Journal from April, Poshmark is reportedly looking to go public this year. The company has made a series of moves to further prove its worth: Serena Williams joined the company’s board of directors in February, and Poshmark is announcing a new tool dubbed Posh Remit to make it easy to collect sales tax on behalf of sellers.
Social platforms have begun ramping up their own social commerce efforts. Chandra said it’s a validation of Poshmark’s business and the notion of buying and selling from others.
“Not only will that happen, but every major retailer will also be forced to confront social commerce as they scale up their platforms,” Chandra said.
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