Intrusive Poshmark Pop Up Ads Interrupt Purchasing & Payouts

Poshmark users are noticing an increase in annoying and intrusive advertising on the site with pop up ads interrupting purchasing and payouts.

Sellers took to Reddit to air their frustration with the ads, saying they are a waste of time and poorly targeted and providing an example of one pop up trying to get the seller to donate to the ASPCA after requesting a balance redemption.

Can someone let the ASPCA know that they're running a weird fundraising campaign on poshmark to people just minding their business and trying to get paid? This is so weird to me haha

That’s a new place to waste our time with ads

I get these pop ups every time I cash out now and it’s driving me insane!!!

Poshmark has been under pressure to increase revenue after last year's very short lived and disastrous buyer fee experiment, and recent job opening at the company show they're looking to ads to help make up the difference.

Poshmark Eyes Ads As Revenue Solution In Wake Of Fee Update Debacle

In wake of fee update debacle, pressure is still on for Poshmark to increase revenue - will expansion of seller-funded ads be the solution?

Value Added ResourceLiz Morton

The platform has had an interesting history with both first party (seller-funded) and third party ads on the site.

Prior to being taken private by Korean internet company Naver in 2022, Poshmark CFO Rodrigo Brumana hinted to investors that some sort of seller paid advertising product could be an important strategy for increasing take rate.

Will Poshmark Introduce Ads To Increase Take Rate?

Do Poshmark CFO’s comments at Goldman Sachs hint at seller paid advertising coming to the platform soon?

Value Added ResourceLiz Morton

The acquisition by Naver was announced about a month after those statements were made, but while becoming a privately owned company meant Poshmark no longer had shareholders to report to, that didn't mean their new parent company wouldn't be just as interested as previous investors in how they could increase revenue through ads and other monetization schemes.

In fact, Naver is the #1 search engine in Korea and, just like with Google, advertising is a huge part of that business, so users were not surprised to see an increase in the amount of third party ads shown on Poshmark after the buy out, nor were they surprised at the introduction of a seller-funded first party ad offering, Promoted Closets - a cost per click advertising option that allows sellers to gain increased visibility for their items.

Poshmark Launches Promoted Closets Ad Program To US Sellers

Poshmark is testing Promoted Closest feature to advertise in prominent locations across search results & brand pages.

Value Added ResourceLiz Morton

While Poshmark doesn't publish a breakout of how much revenue they've earned from Promoted Closet in the year+ since launch, it would stand to reason they may not have looked to increase take rate through a new fee structure or exploring new ways to grow ads and monetization if seller adoption of the existing ad product was exceeding expectations for growth.

So what could they be considering as part of the exciting opportunity to drive business impact? Brumana's 2022 comments may be instructive.

Sellers love Posh because they know where they stand in terms of fees and they work around it, they set up their business knowing exactly what their take home is and how much their going to give.

That being said, we have not touched take rate...and that is very rare, other marketplaces essential doing a change rate almost like every year. I do believe that the opportunity is back to monetizing the engagement and bringing potentially a higher take rate in terms of the blended take rate, not necessarily the transaction.

Yes, can we move up, yes there is room. Can we have flex down for volume, yes but I believe that we are very well set there given the trajectory but the biggest opportunity for monetization might be elsewhere in our properties, especially give the engagement, given the captive audience and the stickiness of our cohorts.

That lead to a follow up question about creating ad offerings to add to that blended take rate, to which he answered:

We don't like to comment before we are ready to say something but I'm going to say looking at other more mature marketplaces is a good place to start in benchmarking us.

At the time I speculated the references to "more mature marketplaces" might point to eBay's Promoted Listings program or Etsy's Offsite Ads as possible templates - and considering what has happened with ads on both sites in the last two years, Poshmark buyers and sellers should be wary if the company decides to go further down that path.

If sellers are showing reticence in adopting Promoted Closets, Poshmark may continue to find more ways to insert third party advertising into the user experience, like these pop up ads at checkout and when requesting a payout.

What do you think of Poshmark's pop up ads? Let us know in the comments below!