The live shopping app Whatnot is in the midst of a notable growth period. After a $225 million funding round late last year, the company is now valued at over $11 billion, with 20 million buyers joining the platform in the last year, drawn in by live auctions that promise deals on items like Chanel bags. In April of this year, Whatnot was the second-most-downloaded shopping app on the Apple App Store, above Amazon and eBay. And as it grows, Whatnot is becoming even more attractive for fashion consumers, sellers and brands.
While Whatnot began with a focus on collectibles and sports trading cards, fashion has emerged over the last year as the biggest category on the platform. Fashion sales are now an order of magnitude larger than sports sales on the platform, according to Whatnot chief product officer Tom Verrilli. There are now more than 12 million fashion orders completed on the platform per month, he said.
Verrilli told Glossy that fashion is a natural fit with Whatnot’s business model. He pointed to sellers like Fashionica, a handbag seller account that has sold more than 10,000 luxury bags on the platform in the last two years.
“There’s a lot of limited edition inventory,” Verrilli said. “If you’re buying something like a luxury bag from France or Japan, you want to see someone who is really knowledgeable about the product who can show you the difference between a modern Chanel and a vintage Chanel.”
Another notable evolution of Whatnot’s platform is the influx of brands selling directly. While the bulk of fashion sales are still vintage and resale from independent sellers, fashion brands like Dolls Kill, the watch brand Invicta and the golf lifestyle brand Callaway have all become active on the platform, each drawing tens of thousands of followers. On Tuesday afternoon, a Dolls Kill livestream brought in hundreds of viewers and sold dozens of costumes from the brand’s Halloween Shop. Viewers chatted with the host, Elle, fawned over a cropped Formula 1 jacket, encouraged each other to buy and requested more diverse sizes.
Whatnot has catered to the brands joining the platform through a number of initiatives, like officially integrating with Shopify so that brands can simply hook up their product API to start selling. Whatnot has also created tools for sellers to quickly populate products by listing metadata.
Independent sellers often leave fields intended for specific product data, such as color or brand, blank or set to their default values, since they will be explaining the product details live anyway. But for brands and new customers, that data is essential. While 90% of products sold on Whatnot have generic listings, 90% of customers’ first purchases on Whatnot are of products with detailed listings.
“The brands we see doing well on Whatnot tend to be founder-operated brands where the founders themselves are going live to show off their brand,” Verrilli said. “Some of our biggest established sellers are doing hundreds of millions in sales, which is why we’ve started to integrate [partners] like Shopify.”
Jake Stewart, the chief revenue officer of the authentication platform Entrupy, said the direct relationship between buyers and brands or sellers is what makes Whatnot such a compelling platform. Entrupy is an official authentication partner of Whatnot and, as Whatnot has expanded further into categories like luxury handbags, their relationship has expanded, as well. Entrupy also works with other live shopping platforms, such as TikTok Shop.
“With any live shopping, we hear from sellers about how many of their customers are repeat customers,” Stewart said, adding that live shopping customers’ return rates can be up to 10x higher than standard e-commerce. “That’s what intrigues brands about the concept. Loyalty is essential, and on live shopping, we’re seeing really high loyalty rates.”
The interest in live shopping has spread to other platforms, as well. Tilt, a competitor to Whatnot, just closed a $26 million funding round this month with investment from Vinted Ventures. Tilt reportedly sees buyers spending over an hour a day on the app. Live shopping sales in the U.S. have already reached $50 billion this year, according to eMarketer.
“In general, we think everything that’s sold on the internet can and should be sold live,” Verrilli said. “We’re focused on meeting the needs of every seller, developing our API and lowering the complexity of selling on Whatnot.”
