At one point, Wish was meant to be the future of online shopping. Founded by ex-Google engineer Peter Szulczewski, the app promised to show you what you wanted before you even searched for it.
By 2015, it was the most downloaded shopping app on Earth, boasting 400 million users and a $14 billion valuation. Amazon and Alibaba even put $10 billion offers on the table. Szulczewski rejected them, saying: “We’ll be bigger than Walmart.”
But behind the rocket ship-like growth, the cracks were already showing. As a write-up by Medium noted, Wish’s model was built on impulse buys: $1 earbuds, $2 dresses, $5 gadgets. It was less about need and more about dopamine hits.
The trouble was, the site became flooded with counterfeit sellers, long delivery times, and refund processes that could drag on for months. Internally, the plan was apparently to 'fix it later'. Unfortunately, for Szulczewski, later never came.
Advert
The company burned through cash at an alarming rate, spending $1.7 billion on ads in 2020 alone, while losing $745 million on $2.5 billion in revenue. When COVID sent digital ad prices soaring, Wish’s only growth engine collapsed. Revenue nosedived from $2.5 billion to $500 million, and monthly users fell from 100 million to just 11 million.
Consumers noticed too. On Reddit, a now-deleted user summed it up: “Yeah, once ‘wish-dot-com version’ became slang for ‘s*******t possible version’ it was pretty much the end for them.”
Another user, perthguppy, added: “They had 0 control or oversight on their sellers. The site very quickly turned into scam central with no way to get buyer protection.”
Advert
Attempts to revive the brand with a new logo and higher prices only backfired.
Further down the sub-thread in response, Knit-witchhh put it: “So it was the same crap as before, but instead of most items being crazy cheap, they were about the same price as Amazon, but lower quality and with like 3 week shipping.”
By the time Temu entered the scene with faster shipping and slicker design, Wish was already in freefall. Szulczewski stepped down in 2022, three CEOs left in a single year, and in 2024, the company was sold for just $173 million; that’s a staggering 99% collapse from its peak.
Advert
If it all sounds familiar, that’s because it is. BlackBerry was once worth $85 billion, with 85 million users glued to BBM, before dismissing the iPhone as a fad. As tech writer from the Guardian — Jonathan Margolis — put it, BlackBerry became 'quite smug', and failed to adapt, eventually shutting down for good in 2022.
Wish may have been built on algorithms and impulse buys rather than qwerty keyboards, but the timeline of rapid growth, refusal to fix the fundamentals, and a brutal crash when reality caught up appears to be a tale as old as modern times.
Ben Williams