> Historically, our merchants in China have benefitted from lower shipping costs due to the Universal Postal Union Treaty (“UPU”). Certain expected changes to UPU postal rates that went into effect in July 2020 are likely to increase the shipping rates our merchants incur to ship products from China. The actions we have taken in our logistics program to mitigate these increased costs may not be successful over the long term. If there are increases in shipping costs, the sales price of products on our platform could increase, which could reduce the volume of transaction activity on our platform to decrease and may consequently have a negative impact on our results of operations.<p>The S1 talks a lot about their logistics platform and diversifying their merchant base to come from different countries, instead of just China - and rightfully so, since until July Wish’s business was subsidized by the Universal Postal Union treaty. Thanks to the UPU, Before July it was cheaper to mail a package to Chicago from Shanghai than to shop to Chicago from Dallas.<p>This has now changed and so the era of cheap shipping from China is over. It’s unclear how much their logistics platform mitigates the new costs, but interesting that they had to go out and build their own fulfillment and cross border carrier services to mitigate.
If there's one IPO that I'm not excited about, is this one. This is a shit model. And I want to apologize in advance to any Wish employees that may be here and that are surely doing hard work to build the logistics and consumer layers of this business.<p>This is a business built on top of cheap Chinese goods, subsidized shipping and low customer expectations. High transaction volume with very low margins, and totally exposed to the winds of international trade policy.<p>This is just a fancy wrapper on top of AliExpress which is honestly superior when it comes to buy crap. In AliExpress you get way more insight into what you're buying and its quality, shipping times, shipping rates, etc. In Wish you don't and you will most likely get the most low tier quality product.<p>I hope that an IPO can bring more discipline into their business and help them move to a more sustainable and innovative model.
As expected, the threat of reputational damage from counterfeit goods features pretty heavily in the IPO. Unfortunately, that damage has already been done. At the moment, 8 of the top 10 results for "wish.com" on YouTube are people exposing scams. Not really a good look for the company.
Huh, I've never heard of this but went to the home page and it sells .. junk? Some of the products remind me of those "THIS ONE WEIRD TRICK" ads
I just downloaded the app again to refresh my memory on what it looked like since I had never actually bought anything off it.<p>Used an anonymous email to register eg clean profile and the front page was filled with scammy hair loss products, male enhancement pills, and foot stickers that claimed it could help you grow 1-6 inches (!), among other cheap suspect goods that looked straight out of some tourist market in Asia.<p>Honestly a little depressing selling Chinese counterfeit crap at scale is a good business. Not exactly something I find particularly exciting or noble.
Is it just me or are there multiple S-1's on here almost every day at the moment?<p>Is there glut of them or are they just overly represented on HN at the moment?
I totally get the Wish hate but I don’t think most here realize why it’s so popular.<p>My family in the Midwest loves wish because they purchase from there knowing the quality isn’t going to be superb. My mom buys random things from them like clothes, jewelry, and random appliances for literally $5. She’s willing to wait three weeks to get her stuff because it’s such a good deal. My dad was able to get a quality DSLR for $50. He doesn’t care if the brand is unknown.<p>Most people on Hacker News (software engineers) probably wouldn’t need to use an app like Wish. It wouldn’t make sense.
From p153:<p>> Our advertising costs to acquire new users constituted 96% of our sales and marketing expenses, and sales and marketing expenses constituted 91% of our operating expenses, in 2019.<p>That's pretty astounding. In 2019 they spent $1.46 billion on sales and marketing, of which $1.41 billion went to new user acquisition. According to the quarterly breakdown of metrics on p108, their LTM Active Buyers went from 61m in March 2019 to 63 million in March 2020, implying they spent nearly a billion and a half to increase their purchasing base by 2 million users... even looking at their peak of June 30 2020, they still only have 70 LTM buyers, implying a CAC for "quality" users of at least $150, and very likely more. Their discussion of CAC payback and LTV / CAC only includes numbers from 2016, which looks like their best year in terms of LTM Active Buyer growth, both on a percentage basis and on an absolute basis... For me to have any faith in this business, I would need to see some kind of analysis of "organic" purchasing behavior. If they turn off the ad spend, will people continue to use the product?
The tolerance of counterfeits is really such a bummer. And it's not just Wish. Amazon has their fair share of counterfeits as well. These "Airpods"[0] are cheap knockoffs, but the images say that they're Airpod Pros. This listing is on the first page of results when you search for Airpods on Amazon.<p>[0]<a href="https://www.amazon.com/Wireless-Headphones-Bluetooth-Earbuds-Cancelling/dp/B08LMDZF93/" rel="nofollow">https://www.amazon.com/Wireless-Headphones-Bluetooth-Earbuds...</a>
Looking at wish, I just had an idea for another startup model.<p>"Massdrop for chinese products"<p>If you are going to build a wrapper company around aliexpress, might as well make curation your strong point. Basically a Chi-fi model as it exists in the audiophile scene, but extended to other domains.<p>Pair that with some 1st party support for 3rd part products and you have something really good on your hands.<p>I would think it would manifest kind of like Uniqlo. In that it is great value-for-money and has a (relatively) small but curated lineup of offerings that cater to a very wide audience.
Don't exactly know why one would invest in what is essentially a digital flea market. Spend your money at the flea market, don't invest in one.<p>All stories I've heard about Wish involve products arriving past the expected date, and a refund being issued.
Another S-1 where all gross profit is being spent on ads:<p><a href="https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1822250/000119312520298630/d82777ds1.htm#fin82777_3" rel="nofollow">https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1822250/000119312520...</a><p>Literally the same amount. Will it grow without full ads burn? Who the heck can tell.
"Our growth has been highly capital efficient. We have been able to achieve this massive growth and scale by having net cumulative cash flow from operations of $16 million from January 1, 2017 to September 30, 2020, aided by our positive cash float, where we receive an upfront payment from a user, and remit payment to a merchant a number of weeks later. In 2019, we generated a net loss of $129 million and Adjusted EBITDA of $(127) million, compared to a net loss of $208 million and Adjusted EBITDA of $(211) million in 2018, and a net loss of $207 million and Adjusted EBITDA of $(135) million in 2017. For the nine months ended September 30, 2020, we generated a net loss of $176 million and Adjusted EBITDA of $(99) million, compared to a net loss of $5 million and Adjusted EBITDA of $(11) million for the nine months ended September 30, 2019."
One of my friends works for Wish, so I hate to rant on them, but I've never had a good experience with them. I've bought two items from Wish now.<p>One of them took about six weeks to arrive, after it was promised to arrive in three. When it arrived broken, I was told there was nothing I could do because I was outside the return window. It was a strip of LED lights, and only the blue lights worked beyond the first section.<p>The second item was also promised in three weeks, but took nine to arrive, which was sad because it was a gift for my wife's birthday, which came many weeks after her birthday. The item was one of those white void photo boxes with a strip of LED lights. It worked well enough for about three uses and then the USB connector broke right off. So it's now just a useless white plastic box.<p>So yeah, I'll probably never order from them again.
I always thought of Wish as an AliExpres front, doing drop-shipping at higher prices. Therefore, I've never used it myself. I might be wrong. Are there good reasons for why someone would recommend their loved ones to use Wish over AliExpress?
I use wish for buying gadgets with dead beat prices, with full awareness that a) it wont last b) its just a cheap hobby.. c) never buy a product which looks sketchy as hell ( ex : a $50 quad cam, full hd , 120 hz display mobile)<p>Some of the products that i bought like a tap faucet filter exceeded my expectations while anything that is electronics had a life span of 2 weeks to 4 months (depending upon usage)..<p>Its a place for cheap products, and the local fivebelow or dollar tree can easily beat them in retail , may be they are trying to do a fivebelow or dollar tree online, which is what their niche is
> We continue to expand our merchant base around the world. The number of merchants on our platform in North America, Europe, and Latin America has grown approximately 234% since 2019. In particular, the number of merchants on our platform in the United States has grown approximately 268% since 2019. Through our diversified and global merchant base, we are able to offer greater depth and breadth of categories and products. For example, in 2019, four out of the top 10 selling merchants on our platform were located in the United States selling refurbished electronics, beauty products, and hobby items, which illustrates the ongoing diversification of our merchant base and product categories.<p>This feels like probably more of a symptom that the Chinese merchant base is probably a bigger amount of smaller shops whereas these US shops (who still only take a minority of the top 10, which is a largely useless metric anyway considering it is unlikely that even 10 large merchants make up a small proportion of sales) are probably part of a smaller volume but are more successful simply because there is less US sellers so there is less competition especially in categories like hobby which are harder for China to serve (I mean think about it, could you name a seller on Wish? It doesn't feel like the opportunity is marketed much). Also the 268% non-China growth metric doesn't really mean much without context and while I do think that Wish is probably succeeding in expanding their merchant base I do feel like their dependence on China is a lot larger then they would like to admit, and even under Joe Biden I doubt that world pressure on China will ease any time soon so Wish may have an unstable future ahead.