Today, we take a deep dive into Poshmark's new bulk share feature. More at www.bemovingforward.com.
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Poshmark's new bulk sharing feature
Poshmark continues to add new features that make it a serious player in ecommerce. On the mini-series, I shared our journey in getting started on the platform and currently, I'm working on a book that details how individuals and small businesses can leverage Poshmark to expand into new markets and generate new revenue streams.
In 2020, the addition of video marked a big leap forward for the platform. Poshmark's stories feature mimics those of Instagram and Facebook to allow short, 15-second videos to display for 24 hours. In early 2021, they expanded video into the listings themselves. Sellers can now shoot videos of their listings and add them as they would a photo. As I've shared on the mini-series, selling clothes online requires many visual tools for marketing and sales. By incorporating video, Poshmark is further blurring lines between ecommerce and social media platform.
The other half of success on the platform is engagement. It's not enough to "set it and forget it." As I shared on prior episodes, one of my biggest mistakes starting out was treating Poshmark like a table at a flea market. It's not enough to list your wares. To succeed, you need to build and engage with an audience. Traditionally, this has been difficult for those who are not influencers or lack a huge social media following. This was one of the challenges we faced when using platforms like Amazon FBA and Shopify. Poshmark builds in many of these features with a robust community of engaged buyers and sellers to tap into. Thus, a big key to success is interacting with your target market. As I've talked about on prior episodes, Poshmark parties, a scheduled two hour block, in which buyers share out listings to interested buyers, can be a huge driver of engagement, new followers, and sales.
The challenge with Poshmark parties and sharing in general is that up until now, it's required sellers to manually share out one item at a time. For a new seller or a seller with only a few items, this may take only a few seconds or minutes. But for a seller listing several hundred or thousand items, sharing them individually can be time consuming. In the case of my dad's store, which has close to 1200 listings, individual sharing at a party requires close to an hour to run through the entire inventory. This is one of the reasons why I went from engaging in daily parties to just two a week, specific to our niche. You can learn more about this on the mini-series.
Recently, Poshmark made a huge leap forward by adding bulk actions. Sellers can now use bulk actions on multiple or all listings. The tool icon at the top-right (replacing the three dots), activates the seller tools menu, which now contains a "bulk listing actions" section. Here, sellers can make offers and edit prices on more than one item. They can also, as is the topic of today's episode, share more than one listing at a time.
Bulk isn't just for Costco.
The steps are fairly straight forward:
Click the tool icon 🛠
Select "Share to Followers"
You will see a your inventory:
For theme parties, I recommend filtering down to the items that fit the brand or theme.
You may also want to filter down to available items (i.e. exclude items you've already sold or are not available).
Check off the items you want to share.
Share 🔄 the items to your followers or to a party.
Tailor made for you checklist lovers.
Once you hit share, Poshmark will run through all of your checked items and share them out accordingly. Bulk sharing cuts my time in half to about 25-35 minutes, leaving me more more time to engage with other buyers and sellers. It also saves me some cramped finger muscles.
A couple of tips and observations that may answer some questions you may have when it comes to bulk sharing:
No limit: As far as I can tell, there is no limit to how many items you can bulk share. Whether you have 10, 100, or 1000, you can check off and share how ever many you want so long as they fit party constraints. Note: the more items you check off, the more time it will require to share them.
Leave the app open: When bulk sharing first came out, I tried an experiment by leaving the app. Initially, Poshmark continued sharing out the items such that when I came back in, I noticed it was ahead and had shared out items while I was away. However, lately, I've noticed that this doesn't work. If I leave the app say on item 50 and come back five minutes later, it will pick up on item 51. It's best to leave the app on while bulk sharing. You may want to temporarily disable any autolock settings if you're bulk sharing a lot of items.
Engagement: When I would manually share each item at a party, our store would get lots of engagement; sometimes hundreds of shares and follows. With bulk sharing, I've noticed our immediate engagement is lower. I'm guessing because bulk sharing does this so quickly. However, the engagement spreads out more long-term and more importantly, this has not impacted sales. In fact our sales are up significantly over last year, though that may be due to other factors. Regardless, don't be alarmed if your immediate engagement is lower with bulk sharing. The time savings is more than worth it.
Wish list: If Poshmark adds a select all button, that will be icing on the cake.
Poshmark continues to provide enhancements that make it truly competitive in the ecommerce space. With the addition of video and bulk actions that allow greater and easier engagement within the Posh community of buyers and sellers, it is quickly becoming a more attractive platform for small businesses and solo sellers.
Additional resources on Poshmark
Check out the Moving Forward mini-series collection
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