One of the fundamentals of e-commerce has really changed over the years, is e-commerce is really now transactional. You think about going to, like, this time of year, the farmers markets, where I live in California, are thriving. And why do people go to the farmers market? Of course, there’s, you know, you want to buy local or you want to buy fresh raw stuff. But there’s something really nice about being able to buy from your local farmer, being able to see him or her on a weekly basis and ask them what’s in season. You have a relationship with your vendor.
You see the same thing in boutiques, physical boutiques around and you go to the main street, you talk to the person, like, what’s new? What’s on sale? Hey, what should I wear going to this event? Or how do I style this? It’s just a very… you don’t need the people, but the people bring this vibrancy to shopping, which is delightful. Otherwise, it’s just a transaction, you are just buying things.
And what we saw when we were launching Poshmark is that e-commerce is growing. Of course, it’s grown a lot more since then. But what’s happening with e-commerce is that all of that human delight got stripped out. And it became, “Find my item at the best price and ship it to me as fast as you can.”
So, it became really, really transactional and all the connection got stripped out. And so what we’re building with Poshmark is, you could say, it’s innovation. Because it hasn’t been done really online. We are just going back to the roots of what we believe shopping has always been, which is humans connecting, sharing about their day, sharing about their knowledge of the item or recommendation or whatever it might be. And then you may or may not transact, but you always love the fact that you have that conversation with that person.
And so we build on that to empower ourselves to use this humanness, their humanity, to bring joy to shopping, but also as a way to drive the conversion of online stores. So, if you ask anyone who runs an online store, would you rather talk more to your customers or less? There’s only one answer you’re going to get, which is obviously more.
