I am naturally an enthusiastic, joyful person. I declare that I love all sorts of things I encounter in an average day—and I usually mean it. I have noticed, however, that many other people—especially those who regularly post on social media—are not like me. People who post their gripes online tend to do so because, well, they have gripes, only some of which are valid. Thus, I tend to disregard the crankier opinions I see on X and Reddit until I’ve tried something out for myself.
That’s what happened this month when I decided to try Poshmark’s “Promoted Closet” feature, which allows you to pay a little bit of money to have your sale listings promoted to potential buyers. I’m in several resale forums and see posters denigrating the feature all the time, but is sometimes the case, my initial suspicion that people are just generally too critical proved correct. In fact, I do love the Promoted Closet feature, which has made me a number of sales and a good deal of money.
Still, while it paid major dividends for me, I understood right away that it’s also not necessarily suitable for everyone.
What is Promoted Closet?
Promoted Closet is a paid feature on Poshmark that puts your listings in front of potential buyers during one-week campaigns that automatically renew and can be canceled any time. When someone searches for a specific brand or item, if you’re promoting your closet and have something that aligns with their search, it’ll pop up higher in their search results.
You get a free one-week trial before you start actually paying, which is what convinced me to finally try it. I already pay for third-party apps like Vendoo and PrimeLister, which help me crosspost my for-sale items across various marketplace apps and give me a little help running my shop through automations, so the idea of paying for a third tool was daunting. Isn’t my entire goal with reselling to make money, not spend it? Still, I decided to give it a shot and see if it worked well enough to justify continuing to pay and, perhaps, canceling one of my other app subscriptions.
Opting in to Promoted Closet gives you access to a dashboard that breaks down how many clicks you’ve gotten and what you paid per click. It tracks sold listings, too, and outlines your return on investment. (The money you pay comes off a debit card, not out of your Poshmark balance.) Within two days of signing up, I’d made $115 in sales from promotions—but that was from one sale (I’ll touch on that in a moment). At first I thought that might be the extent of my success, but other sales trickled in the longer I kept promoting my listings.
Credit: Lindsey Ellefson
After four days, my stats showed my listings had earned 3,756 impressions, 96 clicks, and one sale (for $115). My “spend” was $8.64 (though not really, since I was running the free trial), which amounts to $0.09 per click. My click-through rate is 2.56% and my conversion rate is 1.04%. I do wish the dashboard would highlight “likes” that I received from promotion clicks, but it doesn’t.
After two weeks, I’d garnered 10,820 impressions, 434 clicks, 17 listings sold, and $374 in sales, for a “spend” of a mere $25.79, which breaks down to $0.06 per click. My click-through rate improved to 4.01%, and the conversion rate stood at 3.92%.
I’ve also noticed a greater number of likes on certain listings over the last few days, but can’t prove they came from the promotion—although I suspect they did. When someone likes a listing, you can send them deal offers or move their liked listings into a bundle that makes it easier for them to buy from you in bulk, so to me, likes are the most critical part of Poshmark’s platform. Seeing how many likes I got from the promotion would make me more inclined to keep paying, provided I get a decent number of them—even if someone only “likes” something during a week-long promotion campaign, they are more likely to buy it in the future, making the spend more worth it.
Why people don’t like Promoted Closet
Online criticism of the feature largely centers on the promotion being a “money grab” for Poshmark, which takes a 20% cut of your sales as it is. (In the post linked above, though, you’ll notice the author mentions that “sales tank” when you cancel Promoted Closet, which hints at the fact that it does work.)
Other criticism comes from those who didn’t notice an uptick in sales despite paying for the promotion. I have some theories on why that may have happened.
Who should try Promoted Closet?
I did make a sale within two days of promoting my closet, and I ended up selling 17 listings in two weeks, though a lot of those were bundled into single sales of multiple items at once. I generally make a lot of sales, to be clear, but in the promotions dashboard, Poshmark does a good job of breaking down which sales specifically came from clicks on promotions, so it has been easy to see which of my sales came from promotion clicks and which did not.
Initially, I just sold a pair of Gucci sunglasses for $115. I thought that told me all I needed to know about who can benefit from Promoted Closet, as I was also able to see on the dashboard which of my listings were getting the most impressions—and premium brands like Gucci, Prada, Set Active, Alo, Reformation, On Clouds, Nike, Fendi, and Skims were all on the list. None of the SHEIN or fast fashion pieces I’m reselling made an appearance on the list of most-clicked promotions. This provides a few clues as to the sorts of sellers who should even bother promoting.
The promotions appear in search results, which means if you’re selling a lot of unknown brands or random goods, there’s a higher chance very few people will be searching for them during your one-week campaign period.
Your inventory matters
But hold on: One of the reasons I like Poshmark more than other resale apps, like Depop, is that anything and everything will eventually sell because the focus isn’t solely on clothes—but it can take a while. I’ve sold bobbleheads, electronics, and notebooks, but those items sat around longer than, say, a Skims t-shirt, because fewer people are searching for them. If all I sold were random doodads or clothing brands that don’t get much search traction, there would be no point in paying for promotion.
That’s not all I’m selling, though, and ultimately, though it was the Gucci, Alo, and Set Active that drew people in with the promotion clicks, I still ended up offloading a lot of my lower-quality brands in bundles that were sold to people who clicked those ads—at least according to my dashboard. I ended up getting rid of a bunch of old stuff that wasn’t getting any likes or traction at all, like Victoria’s Secret PINK shirts, Adidas sweats and shorts, and, yes, SHEIN clothes. All of that (and more) was sold in bundles to people who first clicked on an ad from my promotion somewhere in their search results, then then went through my available listings to see what else they could bundle into their order for a discount.
If unknown brands and tchotchkes are all you’re selling, promotion might not be worth it for you. If you have listings from well-known, popular brands, promotion is a much better idea, not only because it can get those items sold, but because your lower-value things might go out the door along with them. It definitely took two weeks for me to notice the trend, but it makes sense because it aligns with how I shop, too: I’m always looking for a deal on something really nice, but if I happen across a few lower-level things in my search, I’ll bundle them into my cart in case the seller is willing to give me a discount for buying more than one thing at a time. So no, the SHEIN and fast fashion items aren’t appearing on my most-clicked promotions list, but they are appearing in my sales list, and at the end of the day, that’s what matters.
Credit: Lindsey Ellefson
Pricing matters too
Moreover, the way you price your stuff is important in this decision. If you sell because you want to clear out your closet and you don’t care much about getting an item’s true value back in the sale, you might not want to pay to promote the closet. A lot of sellers price their stuff cheaply to entice buyers, clear out clutter, or make it more likely to sell multiple listings at once. That’s fine, but if you’re dealing with $10 and $15 listings, it just doesn’t make sense to pay for that. You need at least a few heavy hitters to balance everything out.
On my sales, I made $374, but had to turn around and give about $74 of right back to Poshmark for the app’s cut, brining me down to about $300 in profit. My promotion spend has been $25, which takes me down to $275. All in all, I spent $100 to make $275. To me, that’s really not so bad when it comes to online resale, as a major goal I have is simply getting rid of all the lower-value items crowding my shelves while making a bit of money on the nicer stuff, and my sales page is set up wit that goal in mind. If your aim is to make money hand over fist, this might not be ideal for you. If you only sell lower-tier, rarely searched stuff that won’t draw in clickers, it also might not be ideal.
I do like this feature and will continue to use it, but only because I have many listings for high-search, high-value goods. If that’s not what you have, it might not be the answer for you, although it certainly can’t hurt to try the week-long free trial.
