From different perspectives, you can classify Wish as a variety of platforms. For example, it can push products that consumers need to consumers like the social shopping guide website Wanelo; it can create a seamless trading platform for both supply and demand like Amazon; it can also display various exquisite product pictures to consumers in a waterfall layout like the social photo website Pinterest.
Moreover, Wish perfectly integrates these three characteristics and has formulated a unique market positioning for itself:
(1) Unlike the social shopping guide website Wanelo, Wish does not rely on third-party shopping platforms and has achieved a closed transaction loop.
On most social shopping guide websites represented by Wanelo, when consumers find the products they need, they must go to third-party shopping platforms to trade, which has a certain negative impact on the user’s shopping experience and financial security.
In fact, with the continuous penetration of the Internet, information transmission will become more efficient, and various intermediate links from the supply end to the consumer end will gradually disappear. The existence of shopping guide websites itself is contrary to this development trend. In the domestic market, there have also been shopping guide websites such as Mogujie and Meilishuo, but in the subsequent development process, they have begun to try to transform into e-commerce platforms. In the process of transformation, they have also encountered suppression from domestic e-commerce giants represented by Alibaba. However, relying on its intensive cultivation in the segmented market, it has completed its transformation in the mobile Internet era.
(2) Unlike e-commerce giants such as Amazon, Wish pays great attention to entertainment elements, which enables it to accumulate a large number of loyal users.
As an e-commerce giant that developed from the PC Internet era, Amazon’s business logic that has been used for many years will hinder its innovative development to a certain extent. It is not difficult to find that commodity transactions are the focus of the Amazon platform.
For Wish, it focuses on recommending products that interest them to the vast number of users on mobile terminals. Not only is there a difference in product information between users, but there are also obvious differences in the products that users see at different time points.
(3) Unlike the social image website Pinterest, Wish directly provides commodity trading services to consumers.
Even if consumers find products in pictures that they are interested in on the Pinterest platform, they cannot directly purchase them on the platform. However, consumers on the Wish platform can purchase all the products in the pictures according to their own needs.
The above three points are also the key to why Wish can succeed in the fierce market competition. Its strong influence in the mobile e-commerce industry has attracted the attention of e-commerce giants such as Amazon and EBay, as well as many investment and financing institutions. In May 2015, Forbes pointed out that Wish had completed a new round of financing of more than US$500 million, and the investors in this round of financing gave Wish a valuation of US$3 billion.
Of course, as a startup company, Wish still needs to improve in logistics and after-sales service. With a large amount of financial support, Wish will pay more attention to making up for these shortcomings in the future, thereby reducing its negative impact on consumers’ shopping experience. From the perspective of overall development, Wish is committed to intensively cultivating the field of recommendation shopping algorithms, so as to maintain an absolute leading edge in future market competition.