Losing money for 6 consecutive years, the top seller is out of fashion! From a single product with thousands of orders a day to leaving the market sadly

When will you hear sellers mention Wish now?

When complaining about other platforms, for example:

——Walmart is so tough in blocking the account. Even Wish was not so rogue in the beginning!

——Wish doesn’t treat sellers as “human beings” as Temu does.

Today , Wish seems to be living in other people's stories, and it is difficult to return to its former glory.

In the past, a single link could generate thousands of orders a day, but now Wish has been “banished” by sellers

This year's Q1 financial report shows that Wish is still making losses, and this is its seventh year of losses.

In the first quarter of this year, Wish's revenue was only US$96 million, a year-on-year decrease of 49%; its net loss reached US$89 million, an increase of 48% from US$60 million in the same period last year .

Wish is still struggling, but sellers can no longer be its companions.

In an interview with Een.com, many sellers said they had completely closed their Wish stores and switched to other platforms. Among a large number of interviewees, there were only a few who persisted. When asked why they continued, one seller said, " Many of my personal highlights over the years were given by Wish ."

Yes, Wish, which once stood at the top of the mountain, has also led a large number of sellers through glory, with good performance and a continuous surge in orders.

Javon first came into contact with Wish during his internship at university in 2017. At that time, Wish was "surging", and the platform's benefits naturally attracted Javon, so in the next few years, Javon focused on Wish operations.

According to Javon, he opened three stores on Wish, each of which had dozens of links. During the peak period of the platform, his store's performance was off the charts. Despite the "wrong" advertising, the traffic of a single link soared to 7 million, and it was not uncommon for a single link to receive more than 1,000 orders a day .

However, since the platform was gradually "abandoned" by consumers, Javon's revenue has also been greatly affected. As for Wish's current decline, Javon can only say "the heroes fade away with the tide".

Similar to other sellers, although Javon has not completely withdrawn from Wish, he has already set up shop on other platforms. "I basically leave my Wish store alone now, but I can't say I've given up. My focus has shifted to other platforms, and Wish has been relegated to the sidelines."

The platform is not as good as before, and even the seller group has become deserted.

Oliver, a seller who joined Wish a year earlier than Javon, said that the Wish seller group used to be very active, with people complaining about the platform, sharing hot orders, and exchanging strategies... "There used to be thousands of group messages a day, but now there has been no activity for a year, and the number of group members has dropped from 500 to 50. It's boring."

In 2016, Oliver joined Wish. “At that time, I thought Amazon was not easy to do business and its potential was not as good as Wish.” As it turned out, Oliver’s choice was not wrong. Within a year of running the Wish store, she paid off the 800,000 yuan debt she owed for starting a business .

Oliver tasted a lot of sweetness from the crazy growth of Wish. After that, she closed other platforms and focused only on Wish. That was in 2019, a year when Wish's decline became more and more obvious, but Oliver's store was not affected too much at that time, and the number of orders only declined slightly. In 2020, after Wish went public, she thought the platform would be able to regain its vitality, but she did not expect that the decline would accelerate.

"In 2020, the epidemic broke out. Riding on a wave of opportunities, although it also faced a series of delivery problems, the number of orders increased significantly. It was also in that year that Wish announced its IPO. Everyone thought that the days ahead would be good for drinking and eating meat , but people can't survive the day after all. "

In fact, a few months before Wish went public, the number of orders in Oliver's store was not normal, and many Wish sellers I know were the same. "At that time, I just thought it was a normal fluctuation." But later, the products became less and less popular. " Sometimes a link might only sell 20 orders a month ." After persisting for nearly a year, Oliver closed his two Wish stores in early 2022.

There are many sellers like Javon and Oliver. They have all been successful on Wish, but eventually shifted their focus or left the platform due to its decline. Now Wish is only criticized.

After 6 consecutive years of losses and users leaving the market, has Wish been "exited"?

Disclosed financial reports show that Wish has been losing money since 2017, especially in 2020, when it lost more than $700 million. With the decline, how can sellers hold on?

The sellers left the market, and a number of related practitioners were also forced to leave.

Many Wish operators stated on a certain social platform that since their previous operation experience was from Wish, they did not meet the recruitment requirements for operations on other platforms such as Amazon, and they had not found a job for half a year after the company's layoffs.

Een.com has learned that many Wish operators are no longer engaged in the Wish platform. Some have switched to other platforms like sellers, or have struggled to change industries.

"How long can Wish operate? Not for long. One day it completely withdraws from the market and I will be out of work. It is better to make plans early," said a practitioner.

Job seekers can't find jobs, and recruiters are worried about the lack of jobs. One HR said on a social platform that in 2022, Wish operations were recruited for three or four months but no one was hired. The recruitment requirements were even lowered to no experience, but still no resumes were received. In contrast, eBay operations can hire 5 or 6 people a month.

Another operator said that Wish received less than 10 resumes for operations positions in a month , and this position was so unpopular that it seemed like a new job.

In addition, consumers are no longer optimistic about this platform, especially after Temu went online, some consumers accelerated their exit. In the first quarter of this year, Wish had only 14 million monthly active users , a nearly 10-fold drop from more than 100 million before 2020.

"Wish collapsed, Temu took over." On social platforms, many consumers said that Temu is a "high-end version" of Wish. In the past, although the prices of products on Wish were low, the quality was uneven and the shipping costs were high, which made the experience very poor. Although Wish has made some changes in shipping costs and quality, the prices have also increased accordingly, and the cost-effectiveness cannot compete with Temu.

In 2022, Amazon, Walmart, SHEIN and others are on the list of the top 15 most visited e-commerce platforms in the United States. Even Temu, which has been online for 3 months, appears, but Wish is nowhere to be seen.

Market value plummeted, buyers and sellers were lost, revenue plummeted , losses increased ... Wish has experienced many lows, and transformation and self-rescue are imminent .

Since last year, Wish has made frequent moves: it has changed its leaders several times to form new teams ; it has changed the seller entry mechanism to an invitation system to improve product quality; it has launched the Wish Standards store rating function ; it has reduced its reliance on cross-border transportation from China and diversified its procurement market; it has cooperated with software supplier EverC to quickly monitor and remove counterfeit goods on Wish ; it has improved logistics time efficiency, reducing it from nearly 30 days to 15 days...

In March this year , Wish also launched a seven-day promotion called Wish mas330 .

Wish 's self-rescue has been effective to a certain extent. In the past 18 months, its NPS score has doubled. In the fourth quarter of 2022 , Wish's refund rate fell by 36% and its customer order cancellation rate fell by 58% year-on-year.

But is it easy for Wish to climb to the top of the mountain again?

Nowadays, the cross-border e-commerce market is full of twists and turns, with competitors coming one after another and fighting fiercely. Amazon, which has firmly occupied the first place, SHEIN, which is accelerating, Temu, a rising star, as well as Walmart, AliExpress and a number of local e-commerce platforms, Wish has lost its qualification to compete in the competition due to its continuous losses in the past few years. Rather than getting back the ticket, perhaps it is more important for Wish, which has experienced twists and turns, to take steady steps.

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