
While TikTok’s future in America has turned into a guessing game, there’s a US-based competitor nipping at its heels and gaining momentum, possibly at TikTok’s expense.
Whatnot, launched in 2019, has quickly grown into a leading live-streaming shopping marketplace in North America and Europe. On its platform, users buy and sell items in real-time through a live show or list them in their Whatnot shops, or both.
TikTok, which has more than 170 million users in the US, introduced its ecommerce platform — TikTok Shop — in 2023. On TikTok Shop, sellers can also host live streams to showcase and sell products in real time and set up their own TikTok shop for their businesses and list products there for purchase.
If TikTok is banned in the US, Whatnot said its seller community has a viable replacement with its platform.
“We have, and always will, stay focused on creating the best live shopping experience for both sellers and buyers,” Armand Wilson, Whatnot’s vice president of categories and growth, said in an interview with Bagable.com.
“Small businesses already face uncertainty in their day-to-day; we offer a platform for sellers that is steady and reliable,” he said. “Sellers on Whatnot also have the peace of mind they are working with a company that's giving its undivided attention and resources to support their businesses."
Although Whatnot doesn’t disclose important metrics such as total monthly platform visits or total number of sellers that use it, the business revealed that its annual gross merchandise value (GMV) for livestream sales (or the total value of merchandise sold on its platform) crossed $3 billion and its sales doubled in 2024.
According to its “2024 State of Livestream Selling Report,” Whatnot said two-thirds of sellers (66%) earn more than $10,000 per month through livestream selling and that one in four sellers reported making more than $300,000 annually.
In early January, Whatnot announced it raised $265 million in new funding, bringing its valuation to nearly $5 billion. The company to date has raised about $746 million in total funding. As it anticipates the growth in live shopping to accelerate, Whatnot said it would use the new funding to invest in customer experience by offering more seller tools and expanding into new product categories and geographies.
Armand Wilson spoke with Bagable.com about the future of livestream selling and Whatnot’s growth. Below is a Q&A (edited for length and clarity).
How big is livestream shopping in the US?
Wilson: Definitely in the US, it's still quite nascent but it’s a behavior that’s been around in some form from 2010 in China. If you look there, it's a huge chunk of e-commerce in Asia. In the US, it has evolved from earlier forms of live shopping, such as with QVC.
At Whatnot, we’ve seen a ton of traction over the last few years with livestream shopping, which gets us really excited. More and more, every single week, every single month we see new brands coming into our marketplace and new types of categories that we didn’t necessarily think would work for live selling.
It’s been really fun to watch it grow.
But livestream shopping is still a small sliver of overall e-commerce. McKinsey put out a forecast saying livestream shopping could grow to 10% to 20% of all of e-commerce sales by 2026. We are seeing this rapid growth.
Did the pandemic help to popularize live selling? As consumers, we were suddenly forced to adopt a stay-at-home lifestyle and we turned to the internet for everything, from work to school to shopping.
Wilson: I wish I could say it did. When we launched in 2019, the original idea for Whatnot was as a kind of social marketplace for collectibles.
Around the summer of 2020, we started to see some of our sellers going live on Instagram trying to sell their items in a janky way, with stick-it notes and no integrated payments. It wasn’t that we were looking at China and seeing this huge opportunity. We just wanted to solve this key pain point for our buyers and sellers of collectables.
We launched live shopping in the summer of 2020 and for the next six months we were just focused on one category. We were selling these little toys called Funko Pop. It was pretty small and niche but growth of Whatnot really took off with it. Toward the end of 2020, we started to launch into other categories, such as sports cards and Pokémon cards.
We kind of stayed in the collectibles space for the first year of our live-selling platform. We also launched into comic books. Sneakers was our first non-collectibles category. It was our start into fashion.
If you open up the Whatnot app today, you'll see everything from handbags, coins, people are even live selling plants. Some unique categories are storage unit finds, which is kind of people going through liquidated products, and its very random. That's always a fun one to pop into and just see what's going on there.
Sporting equipment has taken off recently with people selling fishing lures and golf equipment. Callaway Golf brand went live on Whatnot and liquidated some of their old inventory.
A majority of our sellers are small businesses but recently we've seen a lot of bigger brands test out Whatnot and adopt it.
We’ve also had success with sellers on our platform who are in rural areas. If you're a coin shop in a small town that maybe doesn’t get a ton of foot traffic, you can add a new distribution channel by going live from the store and selling coins directly.
What market need is being met by live-stream selling?
Wilson: It’s really solving a couple of different needs for buyers and sellers.
For sellers, let’s use the example of sneakers. Say you have a hundred sneakers and you're listing them across all these different marketplaces. You may casually sell them over the course of the next 30 days. Or, you can go live on Whatnot and do a two-hour stream and sell all hundred of them right there.
And once the stream is over, we streamline the logistics behind the livestream. We handle all the shipping. We think deeply about how we can solve those pain points for sellers and figure out all of those issues that they have running their business.
The live selling component of it just really helps solve a liquidity issue for sellers.
On the shopper side, I would describe Whatnot’s appeal in two different ways. If you go through the best shopping experience you’ve had, like walking into a physical store, you talk to a sales associate who is super friendly and they guide you through a product that you didn't know you wanted and tell you the story behind it that wouldn’t have gotten if you were searching online, we replicate all the best parts of that experience and take away all of the things that maybe are frustrating.
“The average Whatnot shopper purchases over 12 items per week on the platform.”
With live shopping, you don't have to leave your house or wait in line to get into stores. You can sit on your couch, hop into a stream, and find some of your favorite sellers. It’s very common to enter a live stream of a seller that you know and they'll shout you out by name.
I’ve been buying a lot of vintage T-shirts recently. This one seller knows I like boxing T-shirts, like Oscar De La Hoya T-shirts. I pop into a live stream and they’ll say, ‘What's up, Armand!’ and then show me the T-shirt they think I would like.
It feels like an amazing personalized experience.
The second point is that there's a huge community aspect of Whatnot. It’s really what Whatnot was built upon. For every category we launch into, it only works if we have a really passionate community to support it.
Some cool data that we have on the consumer side is that the average Whatnot shopper purchases over 12 items per week. On average, they spend eighty minutes a day on Whatnot. I think people are really coming for a product but also staying for the community feel.
That’s very much the secret sauce behind Whatnot. It’s not just transactional.
Can someone make a living on Whatnot?
Wilson: I get most excited talking about this. I I grew up in my family's restaurant and I know how hard it is to run a small business. I look at Whatnot as a place to enable small businesses to be more successful and to give them the tools to earn a living.
We track a couple of stats internally that get us really excited. One of the recent ones we released is that the top five hundred Whatnot sellers have each earned over a million dollars in lifetime earnings.
We do have a fee structure where we take on average 8% of every transaction and that's our commissions. And we also have a standard payment processing fee.
What does the future look like for Whatnot and for livestream shopping?
Wilson: When I joined Whatnot four years ago, we were a tiny company of less than ten people. We were definitely the underdogs.
When we talk about competition in the space, we think it pushes us to be better. We try not to actually focus on what's out in the market but focus on providing a great experience to our consumers.
We strongly believe that the platforms that provide the best, most trustworthy and entertaining experience to consumers will be the ones that win.
With live selling, with every year that goes by it's starting to become much more mainstream. In 2025, I think you're going to start to see all brands have a strategy for live selling.
We talk to a lot of the bigger brands. They have problems with not only selling stuff through today's new season of inventory in their stores, but also once it's the next season, they have to get rid of all that older product. They’re turning to Whatnot.
We’re also seeing people and brands doing new product drops on livestream selling. I think everyone's experimenting with it in their own way.
The best brand will really figure it out over the course of 2025. We’ll just keep seeing a ton of small businesses, consumers and existing brick and mortar shop, particularly those that are really struggling to pay rent these days, try to find new revenue streams.
With live selling, because of the product-market fit, is really going to come to the top.
For us in 2025, we're going to go much deeper into collectibles, fashion and launch a bunch of other categories.
And then in the next two or three years, you're going see even cars being sold on Whatnot.