Wish, a US mobile B2C cross-border e-commerce platform, has achieved rapid growth in the past two years. As a start-up, Wish has exceeded the $100 million mark in transaction volume in just over two years by focusing on mobile terminals.
Wish, born in Silicon Valley, attracted attention from the outside world at the beginning of its establishment. According to data released by market research institutions, global cross-border e-commerce consumers mainly come from mobile terminals, and mobile users on the Wish platform account for as high as 95%. Today, we are at the node of the transition from PC Internet to mobile Internet, but there are very few e-commerce platforms that can truly cater to this development trend, get rid of the limitations of PC Internet business logic, and make efforts in mobile terminals.
Although Ali’s AliExpress in China and eBay and Amazon abroad are promoting their APP applications to users, the mobile platforms they developed still use PC Internet thinking, and have only made certain adjustments in screen adaptation and human-computer interaction, which makes it difficult to truly bring consumers the ultimate shopping experience.
Comparing the homepages of their mobile APP applications, we can find that: in Alibaba’s AliExpress platform, various promotional activities dazzle users; while eBay focuses on reminding consumers to register and log in, and provides consumers with the service of purchasing goods by category at the bottom of the homepage; on the homepage of Amazon, self-operated products and high-quality products are emphasized in the form of system recommendations.
This homepage layout shows that they are still using PC Internet thinking: AliExpress prefers to attract consumers with promotional discounts, while eBay prefers to browse by category adopted by most e-commerce platforms, and Amazon mainly uses “related recommendations”.
Although Wish’s entrepreneurial team has no experience in operating PC Internet e-commerce platforms, this also allows Wish to not be bound by PC Internet thinking and devote all its energy to focusing on the mobile market. Mobility and fragmentation are the two main characteristics of the mobile Internet era. People carrying smartphones can realize online transactions anytime and anywhere. Fragmented time in scenes such as queuing for ordering food and waiting for buses is fully utilized. If mobile e-commerce platforms can provide personalized and differentiated products for users based on understanding their needs, it will be easy to encourage them to consume in fragmented time.
Wish rarely conducts promotional activities, weakens the search function by category, and pays more attention to recommending personalized products to consumers. When consumers register as Wish users, the system platform will first push some popular products to them, and in the subsequent user management process, collect relevant user data to better understand their consumption needs, thereby realizing customized marketing of products.
For Wish users, the biggest difference between this platform and other mobile APP platforms is that the interface seen by each consumer on the platform is different, and as the platform has more user data, the recommended products will be more accurate, and the pages displayed to users will be more in line with the personalized needs of users. With the help of new generation information technologies such as mobile Internet, big data, and cloud computing, the Wish platform has achieved precise docking with users, greatly improving user loyalty.
Wish was officially born in Silicon Valley, USA in September 2011. The two founders are Zhang Sheng from China and Peter Szulczewski from Europe. Both of them graduated from the Computer Science Department of Waterloo University in Canada, and they were roommates.
After graduation, Zhang Sheng worked for Yahoo and AT&T, and served as a technical team leader and engineering director respectively. Peter Szulczewski worked for technology giants such as Google and Microsoft, and participated in the development of Google AdSense and Google Adwords products.
When Wish was first established, it was not an e-commerce platform. Its main function was to crawl and encourage the uploading of high-quality content on the Internet through an intelligent system, and push product pictures that meet users’ needs based on intelligent algorithms. However, founders Zhang Sheng and Peter Szulczewski found that many consumers had consumption needs for the products recommended to them by the platform, so the Wish platform launched the product trading function in March 2013. It was this change that made Wish begin to enter the ranks of mobile e-commerce.