Wish

Shopping app with mostly Chinese products Visit website

Wish is a popular online shopping app, featuring products of over 100,000 different merchants. It was founded by Peter Szulczewski and Danny Zhang in 2011. Previously, Szulczewski was a coder at Google and Microsoft and is now the CEO of Wish. Zhang worked as a developer at Yahoo and is now Wish’ CTO.

The history of Wish

Wish gets its name from the company’s original bussiness model: it started as a wish-list. By using the app, users could make a wish-list of the products they wanted to have. They could then order these products on other websites, enabling Wish to earn money with affiliate links. In 2013, Wish became an online retailer itself after it asked merchants to host their products directly in the Wish app.

Popular shopping app

Wish claims it supports 500,000 merchant partners as well as over 300 million users. The Wish app was the most downloaded shopping app, for both Android and iOS, in the United States in 2017.

Wish in Europe

In the summer of 2017, Wish announced the establishment of its European office in Amsterdam. With the physical presence there, they wanted to attract more local merchants to their platform. In June 2018, Wish signed a deal with PostNord, so Swedish customer could get their orders faster. And in the same year, the Danish consumer counsil claimed Wish.com’s products violate EU law.

In 2015, Business Insider cited sources close to Wish who said that Amazon and Alibaba showed some serious interest in buying the ecommerce company. “The most interesting rumor is that Amazon recently offered $10 billion in cash for Wish — and Wish walked.”