Poshmark's 'Smart Sell' Feature Is Making Paid Resale Tools Obsolete

Poshmark's 'Smart Sell' Feature Is Making Paid Resale Tools Obsolete

In the resale game, you have to be prepared to negotiate with buyers, and even accept less money than you think your items are worth. That's just how it goes—you can either hold strong to your conviction that the sweater you're selling is worth $100, or you can accept $80 for it and move on. Most non-professional sellers, myself included, end up taking that $80, because you get money and you get rid of the item taking up too much space in your home. Accepting a lower offer is just part of the process, even if it stings.

But a lowball offer? You shouldn't need to waste your time with that—and many platforms, like eBay and Mercari, have automatic tools in place that save you the hassle of having to even see an offer from someone who wants to give you pennies on the dollar. These smart pricing tools are wildly helpful in managing your sales and Poshmark, my favorite resale platform, added smart selling tools of its own in July. Over the last few weeks, I've noticed the "Smart Sell" feature quietly beefing up to compete not only with Mercari and eBay, but paid third-party services that help sellers manage their business. Here's what you need to know.

How Poshmark's "Smart Sell" works when you get an offer

"Smart Sell" is a relatively new feature that rolled out to Poshmark sellers at the end of the summer. The initial rollout went in waves, with sellers getting access to the tool every few days over the course of some weeks. At the time, I had sold enough and had a high enough rating to be considered a level-one Poshmark Ambassador, but even I didn't get it until two weeks after I first heard about it. Eventually, I—and everyone else—got Smart Sell, which means we got the opportunity to automatically counter or accept offers on listings without having to do much of anything.

How it works: You indicate (privately) the lowest price you'll actually be willing to accept for a listing, no matter what price you have it listed for publicly. From there, Poshmark's automations take over. If someone offers you below that minimum threshold, Poshmark counters on your behalf with a more reasonable price. If someone offers above it, Poshmark accepts the offer, and you make a sale.

When it's enabled, you don't have to engage with offers you receive at all. It's all handled by automation.

Poshmark's Smart Sell in action
Creating a "Smart Sell" threshold so my account can automatically counter offers. Credit: Lindsey Ellefson

You have the option to toggle Smart Sell on and off for a particular listing too, so you can prevent Poshmark from accepting an offer you won't be happy with on certain items. For me, that's crucial, because I'm much stricter on, say, the price I'll sell a Gucci bag for than I am on the amount I'll take for a Nike t-shirt. I'll negotiate on the t-shirt, since the difference in selling price isn't likely to be that big, but when it comes to pricier items, I'd rather wait for the right buyer (i.e. one willing to pay close to my asking price) to come along.

This certainly isn't true for everyone, but I'm also a lot less strict on items that take up a lot of physical space. I'd accept a low offer on a big, fleecy sweatsuit and get that behemoth out of my closet, but I wouldn't accept a similarly low offer for a lightweight top from the same brand. For people who sell in a more professional, money-focused way, that might not matter, but for people like me who are trying to free up space for new clothes and earn a little cash to fund said new clothes, all of these details help. I don't apply Smart Sell to high-ticket items or itty-bitty ones that don't take up space, but mid-tier jeans, sweatshirts, and bags can all be handled by automation now and I'm grateful for it.

You find this feature in the page that appears after you create a listing, above the options to share the new listing to your followers and any relevant Posh Parties, shown above. Toggle it on, enter the lowest price you'll accept, and hit List, just as you otherwise would to make the listing live. You aren't committed to that price either—you'll be able to adjust it later, just as you can the public price. You can also choose to turn the feature off even after a listing goes live.

Smart Sell kicks in when you get a like

The automatic offer responses and haggling were the main selling point of Smart Sell when it came out through July and August, but over the past few days, I've noticed something new and little-discussed. On listings where I've enabled Smart Sell, the automations are taking over even before I get an offer. When a user "likes" one of my Smart Sell listings, Poshmark is now sending them an offer on my behalf. These automatic buyer-to-seller offers align with the price threshold I have set for a particular item.

For instance, I have a pair of pajamas listed for $14 publicly, but its Smart Sell value is privately set to $10. Every time someone likes that listing, they get an automatic offer for $12. Just like I can accept, decline, or counter an offer a buyer sends me, they can accept, decline, or counter the offer they receive. If they counter $11, the pajamas will sell to them automatically, but if they counter below $10, the bot will kick in and counter $11 for me. If they go another round, the bot will decline them.

This is nice for a few reasons, although I'm still getting used to it. First, the automatic sending of offers to likers is a feature I've paid for in the past. For a long time, I used a third-party app called PrimeLister, which automated a ton of the tedious tasks associated with selling, like sending offers and sharing listings. That cost about $30 per month so I stopped using it for a while and opted to do all that stuff manually while paying Poshmark directly to promote my listings on-app instead. With the quiet rollout of the new offers-to-likers feature of Smart Sell, I not only save $30 a month on Primelister, but time and energy, since I don't have to send offers one by one on my own.

Smart Sell pros and cons

Even with the automation I can access through Primelister and now Poshmark itself, I still spend a lot of time on the marketplace every day. I create bundles for interested buyers, send out special offers, respond to questions about measurements and condition, and try to build a relationship with the people purchasing my stuff. Smart Sell has pros and cons here. On one hand, it frees up my time to do those things, but on the other, it's pretty rigid. Because a big goal of mine is getting rid of the volume of my personal belongings, I'm constantly trying to encourage people to buy bundles, or more than one item. I discount bundles heavily and the primary appeal of them is that shoppers only need to pay one shipping fee. When Poshmark automatically sends an offer to a liker, it prevents me from sending a bundle offer to them for 24 hours. That was a big reason I stopped using Primelister in the first place. If someone likes four of the items in my storefront, I don't want four offers to go out on the separate listings; I want to put them in a bundle and send a better discount offer to them right away.

Another small issue is that having active offers on listings is a good thing. If I have a pair of shoes listed for $100 and someone offers me $60, I don't decline it, even though I'm annoyed. The reason is that for the 24 hours the offer is active, there's a little badge on the listing that says Act now—offer in progress. That signals to other potential buyers that they need to get a move on because I could accept the offer at any time and they could lose out on the shoes. When the bot counters an offer, no problem; the badge stays up. When it declines one, though, the badge goes away.

But those are pretty niche, low-level complaints. I can always message a potential buyer, tell them they can decline the automatic offer they got, and renegotiate and haggle with them if I need to. In most cases, these automatic offer negotiations are helpful because they're taking place with someone who has liked a single item. If the app wants to take over for me and get one listing sold on my behalf, that's great because when someone is repeatedly sending me lowball offers on a single listing, it takes time and energy to respond to them all. Every once in a while, I'll respect the hustle and—only if I have other sales to drop off at the post office—I'll even accept one. (There is a few-minute delay between receiving an offer and when Smart Sell kicks in to send a counter, so you can still accept lowballs if you want.) I will even go as far as to block repeat offenders; with all those notifications spamming my feed, I might miss out on real offers, likes, or sales. No thanks! I've noticed that with Smart Sell enabled and constantly denying lowballs, the sorts of would-be buyers who swoop in and try to get a single item for 50% off eventually give up and stop clogging up my notifications altogether. That's a win in itself.

I've made some sales thanks to Smart Sell and, along with my discovery of other automation tools on Poshmark, it's helped me move away from third-party automation apps that cost money. It took me a few weeks to figure out a strategy and determine which of my listings I want Smart Sell enabled for, but now that I've got it down, I'm pleased overall. A few hiccups here and there whenever a potential buyer likes more than one item are worth it to make my selling process less time-consuming. Poshmark already sent out four automatic offers on my behalf today and the post office doesn't close for another six hours. With any luck, I'll add another sale or two to the total I'm bringing over to ship out later this afternoon—and I won't have to do anything to facilitate those.

Category Tech
Published Oct 20, 2025
Last Updated 2 hours ago