Wish: The “dark horse” in the field of mobile cross-border e-commerce
Wish, an American mobile B2C cross-border e-commerce platform, has achieved rapid rise in the past two years. The startup has surpassed the $100 million mark in transaction volume in just over two years. Wish, which was born in Silicon Valley, attracted great attention from the outside world at the beginning of its establishment.
According to data released by market research institutions, the main consumers of global cross-border e-commerce come from mobile terminals, and mobile users on the Wish platform account for as high as 95%, which shows that Wish has seized the opportunity in the mobile Internet era. key development trends. Although Alibaba’s AliExpress in China, as well as eBay and Amazon abroad, are also actively promoting their APP applications, the mobile terminals of these platforms still follow the PC Internet thinking, and only make adjustments in terms of screen adaptation and human-computer interaction. It fails to truly provide consumers with the ultimate shopping experience.
It can be seen from the homepage layout of their mobile APP applications: AliExpress prefers to use promotional offers to attract consumers; eBay focuses on reminding users to register and log in, and provides shopping by category. Product services; Amazon mainly uses “associated recommendations” and emphasizes self-operated products and high-quality products.
In contrast, Wish’s entrepreneurial team has no experience in operating PC Internet e-commerce platforms, which allows Wish to be free from the constraints of PC Internet thinking and focus on the mobile market. Mobility and fragmentation are the two main features of the mobile Internet era. People carrying smartphones can conduct online transactions at any time and place. Wish rarely conducts promotional activities, weakens the search function by category, and focuses more on recommending personalized products to consumers.
When a user registers as a Wish user, the system will first push some popular products and collect relevant data during the subsequent user management process to better understand consumer needs and achieve customized marketing of products. Each user sees a different interface on the Wish platform. The more user data the platform has, the more accurate the recommended products will be.
Wish was founded in September 2011 by Zhang Sheng from China and Peter Szulczewski from Europe. The two founders both graduated from Waterloo University in Canada, majoring in computer science, and are roommates. After graduation, Zhang Sheng worked at Yahoo and AT&T, serving as technical team leader and engineering director respectively; Peter Szulczewski worked at technology giants such as Google and Microsoft, and participated in the development of Google AdSense and Google Adwords product.
Wish was not originally an e-commerce platform. Instead, it used an intelligent system to crawl and encourage the uploading of high-quality content on the Internet, and then pushed product pictures that meet users’ needs based on intelligent algorithms. It was not until March 2013 that Wish launched the commodity trading function and began to transform into a mobile e-commerce platform.