Chances are, if you’re a reseller, you’ve heard about “Poshmark bots”, but you aren’t sure what exactly they do and why they are useful. They can be a controversial topic. Some Facebook groups for Poshmark resellers explicitly ban conversations about bots. You won’t see any prominent reselling Youtubers or Instagram accounts talking publicly about using a bot.
Conversations about bots usually happen in private messages instead of out in the open. So it’s difficult to get reliable information about bots unless you have a reseller friend who has used one.
It’s a bit of an open secret that many prominent Poshmark sellers are avid and regular users of these bots, but they won’t ever openly admit to it.
You may ask: why the secrecy here? Why is there so much censorship and controversy surrounding conversation about bots?
This post is meant to be the ultimate guide to Poshmark bots. It will unveil the hidden details and incentives behind the bot world. I’ll go into detail about what they are, why they are useful, why they are so controversial, and what you should do as a reseller when it comes to bots.
A Poshmark bot is a tool that lets you automate tasks on Poshmark. If you’ve been selling on Poshmark for a while, you’re likely aware that Poshmark encourages sellers to share the items in their closet regularly. When you share an item, with the current Poshmark algorithm, that item gets bumped up to the top of the Poshmark feed. If you share more, then more people end up seeing your item, and your odds of getting a sale goes up.
The thing is, it gets super tedious to manually share every single one of your items multiple times per day. If you have 200 items in your closet and you want to share your whole closet four times per day, it will likely take you a full hour to do this manually each day. And it will not be fun. Sharing your closet manually means literally tapping buttons on your phone or computer for an hour straight. But despite this tediousness, sharing is still essential. Sharing regularly is one of the most important Poshmark tips to increase your sales.
The reason why so many prominent Poshmark sellers use bots is that these tools automate this sharing process, saving hours per day for sellers with large closets. It seems like a no brainer, right?
Here’s where the controversy comes in.
The reason why bots are so controversial is because they are technically in violation of Poshmark’s Community Guidelines. The Guidelines state:
“Do not use programs or other forms of automation to participate on Poshmark. This includes, but is not limited to liking, sharing, following, and unfollowing.”
This is why people are so hush-hush about their use of these tools. If a prominent reseller speaks openly about how they use a bot, then there is a risk that Poshmark shuts down their account - why would you broadcast that you’re using one of these tools and take that risk?
In practice, Poshmark has historically been very hands-off when it comes to taking action against Poshmark users who use bots. As long as you aren’t bragging about using one publicly, and as long as you are using it responsibly, then there is very little risk that Poshmark will take action against you account.
This is the dilemma: it is very clearly a huge timesaver (and a money maker) to use a tool to automate your closet, but you have to be private about it.
Some resellers might get upset if you talk about using a bot on a forum like Reddit or in a Facebook group for resellers. Some people might legitimately get mad if they find out. There have been well-known resellers (like Daily Refinement) who have been publicly called out for using a bot.
Why do people get mad? It’s because the resellers who are strictly compliant with Poshmark’s Community Guidelines are at a disadvantage compared to those using sharing tools. If you had to share thousands of items by hand every day (taking hours of manual work), and discovered that others were able to do the same amount of sharing with little to no effort, you might be initially upset as well. A popular Poshmark growth strategy is the 30 minute method - if you could do the 30MM in under five minutes, someone spending the full 30 minutes to execute the strategy might not be happy to hear that.
Other people who might get upset about bots are those paying hundreds of dollars a month to hire a Poshmark virtual assistant.
While Poshmark the company discourages the use of bots, the company understands that sharing all of your items can be tedious and it recommends hiring a virtual assistant if you want to delegate that work. Some people do pay for virtual assistants to do the manual sharing for them.
You should be aware that hiring a VA is a trap.
These virtual assistants might charge between $3-4 per thousand shares. If you have a 500 item closet, it could cost you $200-300 per month to have an assistant share your whole closet four times daily for you. That is expensive: the best-rated Poshmark bot on the market costs $29.99 per month, a tiny fraction of the cost of a VA.
Poshmark virtual assistants nearly always claim to be sharing manually (by hand).
In reality, nearly all VAs are actually using bots.
The VAs claim to be sharing manually because, (as said above), it is against Community Guidelines to use bots. People hire VAs to share manually because they think that hiring a VA avoids the risks of using a bot. This belief is unfortunately incorrect because nearly all VAs use bots.
Consider this: it takes about an hour to share 1000 items manually. Most US-based VAs charge $3-4 per 1000 shares. That means (if VAs are legitimately sharing manually), then in a fully booked day of work they are making maximum $3-4 per hour. Do you really think many VAs would choose to do incredibly tedious manual labor for far below minimum wage, when they could otherwise be using a bot and doing the work completely automatically?
For a VA, it is a no-brainer to use a bot. There is no way for a VA’s clients to tell whether their VA is using one. So nearly all VAs use bots so they can price their work competitively.
That’s the rub: if you are paying for a VA, you are really paying for a bot and overpaying by hundreds of dollars per month.
If you are serious about increasing your sales on Poshmark, using a bot is one of the best returns on investment you can make.
The top-rated and most reasonably priced Poshmark bot is ClosetPilot. It has all of the functionality that you would want in a bot. It lets you:
You get 100 shares per day completely free, and it also has a 7-day free trial of ClosetPilot Pro, which unlocks unlimited sharing, following, and more.