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When ex-Google engineer Peter Szulczewski and ex-Yahoo! developer Danny Zhang launched an app called Wish in 2011, their aim was "to build the largest shopping mall on Earth". They had previously worked on tailoring ads to search-engine queries, but believed the technology was being underused.
"We thought: 'Why don't we take this big-data-driven approach and try it for a different thing?'" recalls Szulczewski, 34. The San Francisco startup now operates in 70 countries, with 1,000 employees and offices in Shanghai and Lisbon, and six million daily shoppers.
Wish looks like eBay crossed with Instagram: a continuous feed of products that can be bought or saved to a wish list. "When you shop on a computer, you type what you are looking for. On the phone, people don't want that much typing, you want to be quick," explains Szulczewski. "Wish is like walking through a shopping mall." Unlike in a mall, however, Wish's users shop directly from the manufacturers.
"There's no middleman," says Szulczewski. Apart from Wish itself, that is, which gets a 15 per cent cut on transactions between shoppers and 150,000 - mostly China-based - merchants. This huge seller base helps keep prices down, with some items being discounted up to 90 per cent. The app's algorithms encourage reductions, says Szulczewski: "We tell merchants that the lower they'll go on price, the more people will see their stuff."
Next on Wish's to-do list: reducing sometimes weeks-long shipping times and adding a premium priority delivery. The likelihood of being snapped up by Amazon, as rumoured in 2015, is dismissed.
"We'll just focus on what we're building," says Szulczewski. "The objective now is to stay independent."
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
