What It Takes to Build a Marketplace: The Poshmark Story | Hacker News Reader

What It Takes to Build a Marketplace: The Poshmark Story

nfx.com

56 pointslxm23 comments

The praise here is over the top. Poshmark is a peer-to-peer clothing marketplace – think eBay, but focused mostly on used or one-off pieces of clothing.

Poshmark has incredible potential given the huge amount of quality clothing inventory, but in my opinion their product and marketing optimize for all the wrong things and make it hard to actually buy things.

What I want from Poshmark is to find and buy clothes I like that fit me. That's it.

What I get from Poshmark:

- They ignore "My Sizes" and show me a feed of women's clothes and incorrect sizes every time I login. I cannot understand how this is still a problem. Why would I buy clothes that are not in my size?

- No way to filter out "One Size" items. Good luck finding your size when shopping a brand that has accessories; you'll be drowning in watches, ties and hats

- Constant notifications for some type of event. Example: 'pm_editor has invited you to "Street Style Chic Party" Today at 7:00 PM' – I get multiple of these daily. I don't want to join a party, I just want to find clothes that fit on my own time and buy them.

- No way to set notifications when items that match my criteria are listed

- Constant promotional emails that are not relevant to me. Example: "Login to to get discounted shipping on your active offers, 4 hours only!" – when I have no active offers.

- Until recently, comments on items (e.g. questions and answers between buyer and seller) did not trigger notifications. So sellers would have no idea that potential buyers were asking questions on their items. I skipped many purchases because I couldn't confirm an important detail

- No option for returns. If I'm buying high-end used clothing, I want the ability to return it if it doesn't fit as expected. I'm happy to pay for return shipping, I just don't want to be stuck with something. I've skipped many many purchases because it was too expensive to commit to without trying it on.

- Disempowered support team. Each time I raise an issue with support, I get the sense they are measured entirely on how little they escalate to teams that can actually change things.

In summary: Poshmark has an incredible inventory of quality used clothing, but they focus on all sorts of features and activities that don't do anything to help me find and buy more items in their marketplace.

I signed up thinking it would be A good idea to diversify outside of eBay. The barrage of notification spam made me uninstall right away.

(Disclaimer: Former Employee)

As I mentioned in another comment this is probably PR fluffery for the IPO that should eventually happen[0]. I don't know when that IPO might happen and I really, really wish I did :)

I'll also add that a lot of your complaints have been around for a while. I personally always disliked parties (and I know I wasn't the only person in Poshmark who disliked them, both in and outside of eng). Overhauling My Size was one of those "we really need to do it but it's a huge engineering commitment nobody wants to make" type of situations. Returns, BTW, don't really fit the business model, unfortunately.

Poshmark definitely has flaws, but it's impressive how much it has succeeded in spite of them. Not the least of which is that the space is pretty crowded; there's depop, mecari, TheRealReal, ThredUp, etc, etc. Never mind EBay! But something is working right to get the kind of user base they have. And a lot of people are ferociously loyal to it.

[0]: https://news.crunchbase.com/news/fashion-resale-marketplace-...

Question: would you use a service that perfectly replicated your existing well fitting clothing? I have this problem — I occasionally find a pair of jeans, shirts etc that fit me really well. Then I can’t buy them again because the brand no longer makes them. I wish I could just get more copies made once in a while. Perhaps with different fabrics...

I've seen services that "clone" your favorite jeans. But it's incredibly expensive to make one-off jeans. The last time I bought jeans I picked up 7 identically-cut pairs at once in a few different washes and colors, for exactly the reason you describe. I've done the same with shirts (even in the same color, just to get double the longevity for that particular style).

What would be more helpful would be true measurements for each piece. For example, very few pants list the leg opening measurement, which is a crucial sizing clue.

I rather strongly try to avoid doing that sort of thing. I have a habit of having an outfit that works very well for some specific context and buying something similar to it repeatedly.

But outside of things I wear to work every day, I don't really need that many context-specific outfits. I don't need 7 dresses that are perfect for summer weddings (even if they're cute). I don't need 7 things to wear to the holiday party. I don't need 7 outfits to wear to the gym - even if they're sometimes athleisure.

Quite often I very directly say to myself, "no, I can't get this, I already have it" - even if the thing I have is its functional equivalent, and not a duplicate. There's no value to having two perfect things to wear to the same event.

There are a tiny handful of mainstays I'd be happy with 20 perfect copies of (socks, mainly). Otherwise I'm trying to match the context and venue, and assuming that is unforeseen, I need a diverse closet to match.

To take your example, why not just get 2 or 3 and run them into the ground? I feel like even worn every other day jeans should last several years... and how many venues do you really wear jeans to?

Ha, in the time since I posted the parent comment, I got a typical email from Poshmark:

Subject: 'Score DISCOUNTS on your likes TODAY'

Email says "These discounts won’t last long, so snag items before they’re gone."

Call to Action (big button): 'View Offers Now'

Result: Takes me to poshmark.com/offer/my_offers and says "No active offers". They must be sending millions of these irrelevant emails to their members.

is it just me, or does the language used in the introduction make the whole thing feel like a huge scam?

I couldn't make it past the first transcript paragraph before my scam-sense was screaming at me to walk away.

It's not just you. Reminds me of this fluff piece about superhuman [0]. It appears to be an article written by the investors, so yeah obviously they are super hyped.

I never heard of Poshmark and I'd like to believe I am not alone with this here either. Looks like fancy ebay with an app to me.

[0]: https://a16z.com/2019/06/27/superhuman/

Poshmark is very well know in the fashion space, which probably has very different demographics to the HN crowd.

(Disclaimer: Former Employee)

Poshmark is quite well known in fashion (especially women's fashion). Not quite HN's target market.... but if you're a woman who shops for clothes online you've probably seen the ads at a bare minimum. I myself was pretty surprised to see how it had succeeded despite being "fancy ebay with an app". (It is almost exclusively fashion, btw).

This does seem entirely like a puff piece; there's talk of an IPO at some point soon[0] so it doesn't surprise me that they'd be starting the hype engine going.

[0]: https://news.crunchbase.com/news/fashion-resale-marketplace-...

> there's talk of an IPO at some point soon[0] so it doesn't surprise me that they'd be starting the hype engine going.

that totally explains it, thanks :)

My girlfriend loves Poshmark. You can buy/sell lightly used clothing for pennies on the dollar. Think of it as Ebay meets slightly upscale Goodwill.

This company is completely new to me, but they appear to be in North America only. Also, is it normal to call yourself 'posh' over there? If someone did it in the UK it would be in the same category as someone with a business called "Honest John's Used Cars".

I can't speak authoritatively for Canada, but in the USA 'posh' is a uncommon word, I associate its use with UK English. I have also never heard of this company, so I'm somewhat skeptical of the claims in the article.

I'm guessing that although the company was founded in NA, the use of 'posh' is related to the founder being Indian, thus acquiring UK English word associations.

I'm a third the way through and still don't know what Poshmark is.

Poshmark is apparently the "#1 way to buy and sell fashion," presumably a competitor to StitchFix, RentTheRunway, among a few others in the space.

No, those are rental services. Poshmark is an online upscale thrift store similar to the brick and mortar store Buffalo Exchange.

It's more like Amazon Seller/eBay for high-end used clothing. StitchFix and Rent the Runway focus on short-term rentals of super high-end clothing. You can also buy SF/RtR used inventory a season or two later it's still really expensive for a well-worn piece and not really their primary business.

Gotcha, thanks for the clarification!

I flagged this because there's nothing interesting here, it's just a promotion piece for the CEO of Poshmark (not even Poshmark itself!)

Someone described Poshmark as competitor to StitchFix or Rent the Runway, and that completely missed the mark on all the products.

Comparing StitchFix to Rent the Runway doesn't seem right either, as StitchFix doesn't loan you the clothes, you buy them. I have purchased three fixes from them so far. From what we can tell, its their own brands they sell.

Agreed, Poshmark doesn't have a clear statement of what it actually is on the landing page. My wife sells her old clothes on there, so I liken it to eBay as some have mentioned.

TL;DR - Poshmark: eBay/Craigslist/OfferUp/LetGo for used clothes - StitchFix: curated clothes (hand picked), subscription based - Rent the Runway: rent clothes, allows for clothes to not collect dust in a closet

StitchFix doesn’t have a “house” brand; much of their clothing is easily found in smaller mid-range boutique stores. It’s usually a bit overpriced for what it is, but they also opened me up to a lot of things I wouldn’t ordinarily have worn but ended up liking.

I look at Stitch Fix as a styling service more than clothes shopping. I can make a request like “something fun and summery I can wear to work in an office” and get something generally appropriate. I also don’t use it as a subscription service; if you buy one box at a time they generally run “no styling fee” promotions often enough there’s not much reason to do the subscription.

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