It was the 2010s and I hope the ads were everywhere. A $1 cat mask. A $10 drone. Also includes a USB-powered pregnancy test. The strangeness never stopped. But behind the virus’s chaos was a company obsessed with growth at every cost. Wish.com has become one of the most downloaded shopping apps on the planet, earning over 400 million users and billions of revenue.
The Fall of Wish: Among the 10 billion dollar startups that have disappeared
They declined a $10 billion acquisition offer from both Amazon and Alibaba and believed it could become the next Walmart. Instead, they collapsed.
Wish’s story is one of massive ambitions, the growth of advertising fuels, and ultimately backfired decisions. They ran on a negative margin and had no meaningful customer support. We also tested fake storefronts to see how far users can develop patience. At their peak, they were the biggest ad buyers on Facebook.
By 2024, their parent company had sold them for $173 million. That’s not a typo. A once-$10 billion unicorn went out for a cent for a dollar.
Internet Dollar Store
In that Prime, Wish.com was a bargain hunter’s heaven. This site is full of incredibly inexpensive products. It has been named drones, watches, sneakers, high-tech accessories. It hardly mattered whether the quality was questionable or not. Users were engrossed in novelty and low prices.
However, the model had a short shelf life.
Wish was founded in 2010 by Peter Szulczewski and Danny Zhang. Raised in Communist Poland, Peter moved to Canada, studied at Waterloo and later joined Google, where he worked on the ad ranking system. He left Google in 2009 and founded a company called Context Logic. The idea was to combine his advertising expertise with e-commerce.
It started as a wish list app. Users saved items and received discounts, growing quickly to expand their user base. However, the wishes were not focused on repeat customers. Instead, they poured money into ads that were trying to promote short-term user acquisition without long-term loyalty.
Scaling without control
As traffic surged, quality fell sharply. The site was filled with imitations, products with false labels, and a few dangerous items that were flat-out. Think of makeup that caused skin rashes and electronic devices that are barely functional. Wish tried to ease the listing by removing millions of products each week, but the damage had already been done.
Then came the pandemic. Unlike most e-commerce companies that saw the boom, wishes were tough. Advertising prices skyrocketed as more companies fought for the digital space. Wish, who was almost entirely dependent on performance marketing, saw the margin disappear. And without a loyal customer base, they couldn’t survive change.
By 2021, their inventory was fighting. I want to lose about 80% of its value. Users left, revenues were declining, investors were losing confidence quickly.
Warning Sign
In 2020, I reported on Wish, which launched a $2 million initiative to support independent, black-owned businesses in the United States. But behind the scenes, things were unraveling.
After the quarter, revenue missed expectations. At one point, the stock price fell 27% in just two days. Revenues increased by about 30% year-on-year.
The company’s CEO, Peter Szulczewski, sent a letter from a shareholder confirming that it was essentially already suspected.
“Many headwinds have slowed demand…holding has declined.”
That one sentence weighed more than the rest of the report. In the next paragraph, we acknowledged that users would leave the app earlier than expected. The time spent on the platform was down. The app installation was down. Their biggest markets, like the US, France and Italy, no longer appeared.
And then there was a blow from Apple. Changes to iOS privacy have made it difficult to target users. Advertisers shifted their budgets and costs rose again. It was the perfect storm for a company that had always been operating on a thin edge.
Then came the temu
By the second half of 2022, new competitors appeared: Temu. Supported by China’s Pinduodu, Temu offered better customer service, faster delivery and even lower prices. It wasn’t just a rival. That was something I should have wanted.
Temu has skyrocketed to the top of the app chart. I hope it slips in even more obscure.
The final blow
Eventually, Context Logic (Wish’s parent company) gave up. They sold the platform to Asian retailers for $173 million. This is a small portion of the $10 billion offer that we once rejected, losing 99% of its value.
It’s a brutal end, but it’s also a lesson.
I want to bet everything on advertising, ignoring the fundamentals of customer retention, product quality and trust. When the ad engine broke down, they had nothing left. There are no loyal users. There are no strong brands. There is no second act.
Their stories are now a case study of what is needed. You cannot buy loyalty. And if your product continues to disappoint those who use it, you cannot grow forever.
Technology moves fast. But trust? This will attract one user at a time.
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