I've never personally had experience because I don't do business with the company because I don't like their business practices. Perhaps someone who had a similar experience will chime in.
What bugs the sh!t out of me is Poshmark's lack of expertise and lack of willingness to admit they're wrong even when it couldn't be more obvious!
I'll relate just one of many cases I've witnessed as an authenticator and will try to make it as concise as possible.
- Buyer purchased a relatively inexpensive Coach bag (well under the threshhold where PM authenticates)
- Buyer received and questioned authenticity on AT Coach
- Item was confirmed as obvious fake with known invalid serial number/creed and construction elements
- Buyer opened dispute; Poshmark looked at listing and deemed bag as authentic.
- Buyer appealed and as goodwill gesture, PM agreed to inspect the bag in person, instructing the buyer to ship it to them.
- Poshmark received bag, examined it in person and again deemed it authentic but offered the buyer a refund to make her happy.
If Poshmark can make these types of mistakes on a Coach bag that is so obviously fake that it shouldn't have needed an expert, one can only imagine the mistakes they've made (and will continue to make) on luxury brands.
I'm moving soon and while gathering all my stuff and conducting inventory, I had my moment of enlightenment and realized I need to thin out my collection. In an effort to do so, and because I got frustrated with Vestiaire's authentication team, I thought I'd give PM a try.
You are correct. For the short time that I've been actively selling on Poshmark, I've seen an incredible amount of fake items. From $20 fakes to the better "super" fakes. Reporting doesn't seem to help and if occasionally they do remove a listing, it's for a poorly constructed, hurt-to-look-at fake. The better ones remain. This makes me wonder if reports are even reviewed by their authenticators and if they are, does this mean that their authentication team does not recognize these items as fake? Or they do, but simply don't care to remove? I have to take a minute to ponder which is worse.
Not only have I reported many listings (to no avail), I've also emailed Posh only to get generic replies that they will be looking into this and in the future to use the report button. Of course, they didn't look into anything, 'cause those scammers with closets full of fakes (with sprinkled in a few authentic ones) are still running wild on their site. I've reached out to numerous (potential) victims, but find this too time consuming, and in a few cases these buyers believed the scammer's version of the truth and turned around calling me the trouble maker. So needless to say I stopped. It's astounding to see the amount of buyers that are being/have been scammed on Posh with absolutely no consequences for the scammers. Most of these transactions are under the $500 threshold, or via PP. Not only do I now question their authenticators' expertise, but also PM's integrity. Why won't they delete listings of fakes and let scammers continue to roam free? I've seen mistakes made by PM in the ATC thread, but seeing that no one is always right 100% of the time, I had hoped that these were just isolated incidents.
If that Coach you mentioned is a horrid fake (and no expertise is needed to tell), it's worrying, or even downright scary that they aren't able to recognize it as such.
If not for some issues I ran into with Vestiaire's authenticators, I wouldn't have moved to PM. After 4 cases of incorrect authentication by VC, where I had to fight, appeal, call, email, explain, provide links/examples and in 2 cases also authenticity certificates by a reputable third party for my funds to be finally released (yes, they took their sweet time), I got so exhausted and thought I would try my luck elsewhere. The sad thing is that these items were fairly easy to authenticate, too. It's so ironic, I sell on VC, because I thought it would be stress-free (aka no scam buyers), but now it's their authentication team that stresses me out. Every time I sell something, it's hoping and praying that their authenticators would get it right. Seems like I'm going through the same thing with Posh now. I've never had an item rejected in all my years of selling to
Fashionphile and Yoogis. It's just the lowballing that puts me off and made me want to set my own price. I've always thought that if what you send in is authentic, you wouldn't have to worry about it being rejected on grounds of authenticity. For certain items I can understand that mistakes are made if authentication is based on pics alone, but if you have the item in your hands and you can feel, smell, compare, but most importantly
take your own pictures of all the needed details exactly the way you want them, I'm surprised by the incorrect authentications, especially when these items are fairly easy to authenticate and didn't need physical inspection to begin with.
