Poshmark has over 80 million registered users across 90% of zip codes in the US, and its new owner is looking to consumer selling and “livestreaming commerce” for growth.
We reported in October that Korean company Naver Corp. was acquiring social ecommerce platform Poshmark for $1.2 billion. The sale went through on January 5th, which was one year and a day after a Poshmark board member introduced CEO Manish Chandra to representatives of Naver to explore a potential commercial partnership.
By January 12 of last year, the two companies had entered into a mutual non-disclosure agreement to explore a partnership and investment. Ultimately, had the sale not been consummated by April 3, 2023, Poshmark would have owed Naver a termination fee of $52 million.
Naver operates Korea’s number-one search engine and largest ecommerce platform (with 70% market share) that has over 530,000 smartstores (sellers), and it’s a leading provider of fintech services, digital content and cloud services.
In a press release last week, Naver CEO Sooyeon Choi said he was confident Naver’s leading technology in search, AI recommendation, and ecommerce tools would enhance the user experience for the Poshmark community and create additional value for all its stakeholders. “Naver and Poshmark will immediately be well-positioned to compete globally in the future and benefit from C2C as a major revenue source.” (C2C refers to consumer-to-consumer selling.)
Poshmark celebrated its 11-year anniversary last month with an event in San Francisco. Poshmark continues to run promotions (it’s currently running a “January $10K Listing Event” sweepstakes), and while Poshmark is thought of as fashion platform, it added an Electronics category in 2021.
As previously announced, Poshmark will continue to operate under its existing brand, as well as maintain its employee base, Poshmark community, and headquarters in Redwood City, California.
Poshmark founder Manish Chandra will remain CEO – his salary, golden handshake provision, and other compensation details are contained in the “New Arrangements with Company Executive Officers” section of the proxy statement outlining the transaction.
Poshmark went public on the Nasdaq stock exchange 2 years ago this month. In connection with the completion of the transaction, Poshmark common stock ceased trading and was delisted from Nasdaq on January 5, 2023.
The problem with Posh is that it is too dependent on follows for follows, sharing each other’s listings and that sort of nonsense that got Etsy off to a slow start. Poshmark search is crap. If I search a particular brand and style or size, it will return everything under the sun. If the future is these live selling parties in the middle of the night, my sales will be even more dismal than they are now. Posh is for people with nothing else to do. If you want to list items for sale that will be seen by potential buyers, this is not the place to do it.
I only list on Posh what I cannot legitimately list on Etsy and what has way too much price competition on eBay. And, most of what I have listed on Posh is cross listed elsewhere and sells elsewhere.
A Posh sale is a rare happy moment.