At one stage, Wish was envisioned as the future of e-commerce. Launched by former Google engineer Peter Szulczewski, the platform aimed to predict what users wanted before they even searched for it.
By 2015, the app had become the most downloaded shopping platform globally, with 400 million users and a valuation of $14 billion. Amazon and Alibaba reportedly offered $10 billion for the company. Szulczewski declined, asserting, “We’ll be bigger than Walmart.”
However, the rapid growth masked underlying issues. As highlighted in a Medium article, Wish’s business model relied heavily on impulse purchases like $1 earbuds, $2 dresses, and $5 gadgets, driven more by momentary satisfaction than necessity.
The platform soon became overwhelmed by counterfeit products, lengthy delivery times, and complex refund processes. Internally, the approach seemed to be to ‘address it later’, but later never materialized for Szulczewski.
The company faced financial difficulties, spending $1.7 billion on advertisements in 2020 while incurring losses of $745 million on $2.5 billion in revenue. The rise in digital advertising costs during the COVID pandemic led to the collapse of Wish’s growth strategy. Consequently, revenue plummeted from $2.5 billion to $500 million, and monthly user numbers decreased from 100 million to only 11 million.
Consumer sentiment shifted as well. On Reddit, a user whose account has since been deleted described the situation: “Yeah, once ‘wish-dot-com version’ became slang for ‘s*******t possible version’ it was pretty much the end for them.”
Another Reddit user, perthguppy, commented: “They had 0 control or oversight on their sellers. The site very quickly turned into scam central with no way to get buyer protection.”
Efforts to rejuvenate the brand with a new logo and increased prices backfired.
Further down the discussion thread, Knit-witchhh remarked: “So it was the same crap as before, but instead of most items being crazy cheap, they were about the same price as Amazon, but lower quality and with like 3 week shipping.”
By the time Temu arrived on the market with more efficient shipping and a more polished design, Wish was already declining. Szulczewski resigned in 2022, and the company went through three CEOs in a single year. By 2024, Wish was sold for just $173 million, a 99% fall from its peak valuation.
This scenario might sound familiar. BlackBerry, once valued at $85 billion with 85 million users engaged on BBM, dismissed the iPhone as a trend. As Jonathan Margolis, a technology writer for the Guardian, noted, BlackBerry became ‘quite smug’ and failed to adapt, eventually closing in 2022.
Though Wish was driven by algorithms and spontaneous purchases rather than qwerty keyboards, the pattern of rapid expansion, neglecting fundamental issues, and a harsh downfall when reality prevailed is a familiar narrative in the modern era.