A series of major changes! The former top cross-border platform suffered a Waterloo

Current status of Wish seller group↓

Seller A: Boss, how about Wish?

Seller B: It’s not the boss anymore, it’s **.

Seller C: If you are a newbie, don’t use Wish. Wouldn’t it be better to work on other platforms?

Big Seller D: I haven’t checked Wish for a long time. It seems like there are about a hundred orders a day.

Since the concept of cross-border e-commerce emerged, Wish has fought its way out by relying on the right time, place and its own development, and successfully became one of the four major mainstream platforms. Now that cross-border e-commerce is developing rapidly and new e-commerce platforms are emerging one after another, many sellers seem to have forgotten the existence of the Wish platform. What happened to Wish, which has been falling behind and fading from the sellers' vision?

Stop seller self-registration! Wish was forced to withdraw from multiple markets

Some time ago, Wish announced important changes, stating that it has suspended the open model of free account registration through merchant.wish.com, and announced that it will implement an "invitation system" for merchant registration in the next few months . New merchants who want to join Wish will need to go through multiple rounds of review.

While Wish's move has attracted the attention of many sellers, it also makes people wonder whether it wants to change the status quo through new measures to restore its image and losses. However, the response of more sellers is "Does anyone still do Wish now?"

Many sellers responded that Wish no longer cares about them and that they will let their stores fend for themselves . Their future prospects will all depend on the store's luck. Some sellers even said that they hope the final straw for Wish will come sooner rather than later.

As one of the platforms with many sellers' top combinations, Wish's popularity in the early days could even be described as top-tier. Many small and medium-sized sellers would use Wish as their starting platform in cross-border e-commerce, but now Wish's status has changed.

Wish has frequently suffered setbacks in its main battlefield - Europe.

Recently, several French government officials issued a joint statement, requiring local search engines to prohibit the display of the Wish website in search results . At the same time, they required major app stores to remove the Wish APP . Google, Apple, Bing, etc. have responded to the government's request and removed the Wish APP and search results.

This is related to the British government's suspicion that third-party sellers are misleading consumers and selling counterfeit goods on the Wish platform. When the investigation results are basically true, third-party sellers still sell such goods by changing their appearance.

Before the incident happened on Black Friday, the platform was almost in a semi-disappeared state, and the platform sales plummeted. The website's traffic data showed that the French market and search traffic both declined. In addition to this ban, Wish's total website traffic also showed a significant decline, especially in October last year , when its visits even dropped by half.

In addition, many sellers have expressed their dissatisfaction with Wish's platform policies. As early as 2019, Wish temporarily withheld sellers' funds for various reasons; in 2020, most sellers said that there were large-scale suspected fraud and violations, and Wish fully refunded these orders and imposed a fine of 20% of the order amount; sellers went to the door of Wish to hang banners.

From being popular to being deserted, can the “ American version of Pinduoduo ” return to its peak?

Although Wish has not disappeared in recent years, it has rarely made a splash in the industry.

The development of Wish has also been watched by industry insiders. In the eyes of some industry insiders, Wish has lost its former glory and its position in the industry has been declining ...

Back then, Wish successfully gained a foothold in the industry with its low prices , and once became the most downloaded global shopping app . This platform, once known as the " American version of Pinduoduo ", captured the hearts of many consumers, and the number of merchants and transaction volume on the platform increased significantly.

However, under the influence of a series of factors such as fierce competition, falling stock prices, and declining user retention , Wish's survival in the industry began to become difficult. More and more platform sellers began to feel that the road ahead was bumpy and fled one after another.

The low threshold may be one of the important factors that attracted a large number of sellers to Wish . A former Wish seller said: "I chose Wish at that time because the platform had considerable profits and fast order processing . At that time, there were not many sellers on the platform and there was almost no so-called competition. As long as the products were well selected, they would be sold out soon after they were put on the shelves. "

However, as a large number of sellers quickly poured in, new problems also emerged. Some platform sellers began to "violate regulations", the more common ones being bulk distribution and fake orders . A seller revealed that for new sellers who had just come into contact with Wish at that time , bulk distribution was more like a shortcut, which could help the store gain exposure, maintain activity, and have traffic, so many sellers chose the bulk distribution model at that time.

According to industry insiders, sellers did not need a corporate name when registering a new Wish store, which gave some sellers the opportunity to "make a quick buck and then quit." However, it was precisely because of these sellers' actions that Wish 's reputation declined and the platform traffic also dropped.

In order to rectify the chaos on the platform, Wish once said that it would issue fines to sellers who disrupted the fairness of the platform to serve as a warning. But in fact, this method not only failed to achieve the purpose of rectification, but also caused dissatisfaction among some "innocent" sellers. They were fined without any violations, which greatly dampened the enthusiasm of sellers.

On the other hand, Wish ’s protection of buyers makes it impossible for some sellers to guarantee their rights and interests , which is also one of the main points of complaints from many sellers on the platform.

In general, Wish 's glory and gloom are closely related to " low prices ". It is undeniable that Wish did rely on low prices to enter the market in the early stage, but after the mid-term, the low-price route made users question the quality of the products. At the same time, multiple problems such as logistics and lax platform supervision are also important reasons for the decline in platform user retention.

In the cross-border e-commerce industry, product quality is the key for both buyers and sellers. As for the newly launched "invitation system" registration on the platform , this move has raised the entry threshold without affecting the existing sellers on the platform, in order to screen high-quality sellers.

Wish 's changes are not only aimed at new sellers, the platform is also strengthening supervision of existing sellers. It is understood that Wish has recently suspended sales of some stores of sellers who have violated regulations.

To a certain extent, Wish's continuous actions are aimed at regaining the attention and trust of buyers and sellers. As the competition becomes more and more crowded, Wish is also facing huge challenges. For Wish in the future , if it wants to continue to play in this industry, its clear positioning, unique category advantages and platform ecology will be the top priority.

Wish

Cross-border platform

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