Wish is a mobile and web e-commerce platform. It was founded in 2011 by Peter Szulczewski (CEO) and Danny Zhang (CTO), former programmers at Google and Yahoo. Wish is the 6th largest e-commerce company in the world and has over US$1billion in funding. In 2017, the Wish mobile shopping app had over 100 million users on the iOS and Android platforms.
Similar to eBay, small businesses and manufacturers on Wish sell goods directly to consumers. Wish does not currently offer its own Wish-branded goods. In 2017, the app added Wish Outlet, which sells overstocked high-quality brand goods at discounted prices. The app also added Wish Express, which offers faster shipping.
Wish runs four other specialized shopping apps: Geek (electronics-focused), Mama (family-oriented), Cute (beauty-focused), and Home (decor-focused). Wish also has a local marketplace app called Wish Local.
In 2011, Wish was created as a wishlist app, which allowed users to save their most-wanted products. As the app gained popularity, the Wish team noticed that the most-frequently saved items were low-priced goods. So the Wish team approached merchants with this pitch, “Thousands of people have saved products on Wish, so why not sell your products directly to consumers on the app.” The pitch worked and Wish became an e-commerce platform.
The shopping app has over 300 million users around the world. It is the #1 shopping app in 42 countries. Wish is the largest advertiser on Facebook and spends nearly $500 million a year on Facebook ads alone.
Wish became the most-downloaded shopping app in the USA in 2017. Over the course of the year, across the iOS App Store and Google Play store, Wish had 32.5 million U.S. downloads compared to Amazon’s 29.2 million.