Resale platforms have exploded in popularity over the last few years. Manish Chandra, Poshmark CEO, joins Yahoo Finance to discuss the driving factors behind the number of resale listings on the platform as well as how the platform is utilizing tech to enhance customer experience.
Chandra gives insight into what three factors are driving his business, first being the "drive towards very, very cheap stuff" countered by the desire to have value, quality, and sustainability. "The second thing is, I think. the simplicity of platform is helping, what we've done, what other platforms have done, making shipping, selling protections, all of that, is really, really simple. The third thing in 2023, which has caught us by surprise, is we launched livesrtraming and video shopping, and that has taken and become a pretty big part of our business," Chandra says.
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Editor's note: This article was written by Nicholas Jacobino
Video Transcript
JULIE HYMAN: I'm curious, Manish, what you think is driving the resale business. Is it value? Is it sort of environmental consciousness and push back against fast retail? What are you hearing from your customers about what attracts them to it?
MANISH CHANDRA: Well, if you see the two trends that are driving retail right now, particularly in fashion and in style-oriented categories, it's-- one is sort of drive towards very, very cheap stuff. So you see direct from Chinese sites like Temu and Shein take over on one side. And the second thing is you still want value, but you want quality, you want sustainability. You want to make sure that you're honoring both the planet, your family, but also your budget.
And that's where Resale is really turning out to be a huge winner, because consumers look at our platform and other platforms and Resale as both a place to go shop but also a place to revolve their closet and contribute to this economy. So that's really the first thing.
The second thing is I think the simplicity of platform is helping. What we've done, what other platforms have done, making shipping, selling, protections, all of that is really, really simple. The third thing in 2023, which has caught us by surprise, is we launched live streaming and video shopping. And that has really taken and become a pretty big part of our business in Q4.
JOSH LIPTON: And, Manish, I'm also interested in whether, you know, any kind of measures strategies, Manish, you're kind of putting in place to make sure that you're not profiting, inadvertently profiting from theft.
MANISH CHANDRA: Oh, theft is something that we've been washed up for a long time. It's something we have multiple measures on the platform. The good thing is that we haven't seen any remarkable changes in the percentage of reports that come in. We have both direct reporting procedures. We cooperate and work with the local law agencies and make sure that anything that is even suspected of being stolen is both taken down from the site but then also the individuals are connected to the local law enforcement.
JULIE HYMAN: Manish, I guess it's almost a year to the day that you closed on your sale to Naver, if I'm saying it correctly, the South Korean company. What are some of the changes you have seen-- are you seeing different for example global sales patterns or an expansion globally under their ownership? Talk us through that.
MANISH CHANDRA: Yeah. So one of the big things that Naver and Poshmark really decided to do was a lot of collaboration around deep technology. Naver as you know, is sort of like have deep tech stack, like Google. In Korea, they've been developing their own language learning models. They have a very deep search stack. And so what we've been doing is partnering with them.
We released first collaboration in the form of Poshlens, which is visual search. You should see more announcement from that partnership over the course of the next year. The second thing that has allowed us to do is to really invest in our own technology. So you see us releasing features at a faster clip rate. We've been able to really focus on things like live streaming and live shopping and some of these things that are very had huge growth in Asia but have been like a little slow to catch on in America.
And we've seen almost like over 1,000% growth in Posh Shows, our video shopping product. Just in the holiday season, there were over 100,000,000 minutes of shows that happened and over 4 million orders placed through live shopping on Poshmark just during the holiday season.