What is Zulily? Zulily Review, Features

Zulily is a group-buying website for maternal and infant products in the United States. It is an Internet flash sale platform. Zulily has greatly enriched its product categories. Zulily updates flash sale products every day, covering categories including clothing, home furnishings, toys, gifts, etc.

About Zulily

Zulily was founded in 2009 by Mark Vadon and Darrell Cavens, former executives of the online diamond sales platform Blue Nile. Zulily went online on January 27, 2010, initially focusing on children's clothing. Zulily is headquartered in Seattle and has offices in Ohio, Nevada and Pennsylvania.

On the Zulily website, consumers can find popular brands such as Kenneth Cole and Gigi. Zulily is a free membership system, and members can enjoy up to 10% off sales prices. But at the same time, Zulily requires registration before you can see the price of the product and participate in the purchase.

Zulily is a flash sale website with limited time. It is similar to many flash sale websites in the United States. The big brands are very attractive at low prices, but they are also very popular. Basically, you need to grab them. The website will often send emails to inform customers of today's discounts.

Target Group

Zulily’s target audience is mothers who are looking for unique brands and products for their children; their audience is also described as “young, tech-savvy moms.”

Features

1. High-quality products and reasonable pricing: Zulily's most attractive feature is its fast product update speed. The company has a marketing team of about 500 people who bargain with a large number of suppliers every day, and the prices of goods are very good. Zulily unanimously agreed in internal meetings that reasonable pricing is the core key to the company's success.

2. "Flash Sale" featuring limited-time special sales: At 6 a.m. every day, it will launch dozens of new high-quality products with discounts of up to 30% off, limited time (usually taken off the shelves after 72 hours) and limited quantity (while stocks last).

3. Focus on maternal and infant products: Its service objects are mostly housewives, so the types of goods sold include women's and infant clothing, toys, etc.

4. Support small brands: The difference between Zulily and other group buying websites is that it does not start with big brands, but focuses on recommending small brands and increasing discounts to establish brand positioning among users - similar to Taobao's "Taobao brands".

5. Personalized needs: Although more than half of the brands that cooperate with Zulily are from smaller companies, their products are often uniquely designed to meet the personalized demands of consumers.

6. Zero inventory management model: In view of the inventory and logistics system that accounts for a large amount of operating costs in e-commerce, Zulily has adopted a zero inventory model to reduce costs. That is, after the user completes the flash purchase and confirms the order, Zulily will start the product procurement, testing, packaging, distribution, and logistics procedures, which greatly shortens the inventory time of the goods and avoids the risk of product backlog and poor sales.

7. Long delivery cycle and no return support: side effects of zero inventory management model.

Development History

-In 2009, Zulily was founded by Mark Vadon and Darrell Cavens, former CEOs of Blue Nile, an online diamond sales platform.

-On January 27, 2010, Zulily went online.

-In August 2012, Zulily received $43 million in Series C funding, led by Meritech Capital Partners, Facebook's largest business partner with a valuation of $750 million.

-In December 2012, it received $85 million in Series D funding led by Andreessen Horowitz, with a valuation of $1 billion.

In November 2013, when Zulily went public, the company had 2.6 million active customers and $331 million in revenue.

- In 2014, half of Zulily’s orders came from mobile devices, and sales typically lasted 72 hours.

-In May 2015, Alibaba invested $65 million to acquire a 9% stake in Zulily, becoming the company's largest single shareholder.

-In August 2015, Liberty Interactive Corp., the parent company of American TV shopping company QVC Group, acquired Zulily for $2.6 billion.

-In September 2017, Zulily launched its own-brand credit card.