As discount shopping app Wish continues its comeback effort, parent company ContextLogic outlined its plans for 2023 at a summit for its merchants — including a major overhaul of the platform’s shipment pricing structure in order to bring down shipping costs for customers.
Not too long ago, Wish was the top shopping app in the world, but eventually the very thing that helped it grow so large so quickly — shockingly cheap products — was also what caused it to lose favor with shoppers: when those products sometimes turned out to be cheaply made or deceptively marketed and took weeks to arrive.
At the beginning of 2022, the company appointed Vijay Talwar as CEO as the final piece of a complete C-suite overhaul. Talwar quickly got to work on a turnaround strategy that involved an overhaul of Wish’s merchant base, a rebrand and a major marketing push to reintroduce itself to shoppers.
The immediate results appear to have not satisfied the Wish Board and investors though, because Talwar was out after a mere seven months. In September 2022, ContextLogic announced that Wish veteran Joe Yan — who also has worked at Stripe, Google, Alibaba Group and Amazon (all in China) — was taking on the role on an interim basis while the search for a new CEO began.
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Yan is now pushing ahead with the company’s transformation, which will include a “renewed focus on improving the customer experience, deepening merchant relationships and achieving operational excellence,” according to a press release from ContextLogic.
At the Wish 2022 Global Merchant Summit, shipping costs were the banner topic. In the first half of 2023, the platform intends to “look at” discounted shipping programs such as “buy more, save more” offers and a simplified rate card for WishPost. ContextLogic said the moves are in direct response to consumer feedback, which show that shipping costs are one of the major pain points in the Wish shopping experience.
At the merchant summit, Wish also highlighted its new features from 2022, many of which were implemented under Talwar’s tenure, including:
- A revamped fashion shopping experience called Wish Fashion;
- The shoppable videos feature Wish Clips;
- The merchant scoring system, Wish Standards, which aims to improve product and fulfillment quality on the platform, another major customer complaint;
- A new guest checkout experience; and
- A redesigned homepage that showcases the new brand and features collection modules, category tabs, wish lists and more.
More recently, Wish also debuted a new Deals Hub promotion platform that merchants can leverage to increase their product exposure across the Wish platform. The brand also opened a pop-up shop from Dec. 1-4, 2022 in London in partnership with buy now, pay later provider Klarna, to allow “guests to submerge themselves into the magical world of Wish.”
“Our success is inextricably linked with the success of our merchants. That’s why we’ve spent the last year focusing on retooling our platform with our merchants’ needs top of mind,” said Yan in statement. “The changes we have made to the user and merchant experience in the past 12 months are already yielding positive results. We look forward to building on those successes to strengthen the relationships with our users and merchants in 2023.”
