Marketplace Briefing: How live shopping platform Whatnot is scooping up a greater share of the livestream shopping pie

For years, platforms have tried to crack the code of social and livestream shopping in the U.S. Whatnot’s growth shows promise for the live commerce industry, a market that lags significantly behind China, where livestream shopping is a $703 billion industry. In contrast, livestream shopping apps in the U.S. have faced challenges. TikTok Shop, one of the biggest platforms for live shopping in the U.S. is staring down a nationwide ban. Meanwhile, social media companies like Meta’s Instagram and Facebook have walked back their social commerce bets

The company did not disclose exact sales figures, but Whatnot’s earnings were likely a small piece of the holiday shopping pie. TikTok, which launched its e-commerce business in the U.S. just over a year ago, earned more than $100 million on Black Friday. A year ago, TikTok said it planned to expand its U.S. business to around $17.5 billion in GMV this year, per Bloomberg. Black Friday sales in the U.S. totaled $10.8 billion. Still, the data shows live shopping is gaining traction.

Whanot’s Black Friday sales followed another significant milestone. In November, the company said that it had surpassed $2 billion in year-to-date livestream sales, a first for the company. 

On average, Whatnot’s users spend 80 minutes daily watching livestreams and make 10 times more transactions than users of other peer-to-peer marketplaces, according to the company. In 2024, Whatnot’s user engagement reached record heights. Live shows sparked more than 1 billion chat interactions between buyers and sellers, and more than 10 million happened on the platform. 

Modern Retail spoke with Tom Verilli, Whatnot’s chief product officer, about the platform’s latest Black Friday success, what’s driving Whatnot’s growth and the future of live shopping in the U.S.

This conversation has been edited and condensed for length and clarity.

With live shopping still relatively nascent in the U.S., how does Whatnot educate sellers about live shopping and help them ensure sellers maximize sales during lives?
Our goal is to make sure that what we have is a suite of tools that helps any seller who wants to bring their business to Whatnot work. So things like being able to run simultaneous auctions help people run a large volume of sales. We also have the ability right now for people to run auctions outside of a live stream, and you can run them over the course of a week. 

A coin seller of ours was able to sell $100,000 in coins on Whatnot at the start of September, but it would have taken him at least 10 years to earn that on eBay because of its static marketplace format. They were able to sell more inventory in less time on Whatnot. There’s probably a plethora of different selling formats that we’ll keep exploring. 

Whatnot started out with a focus on collectibles and memorabilia. But it has also recently expanded into many other categories, including beauty and fashion. How are some of those newer categories performing, and what does Whatnot have planned next in terms of further product expansion?
It’s our ambition to support any seller who wants to sell anything on Whatnot. So, for example, if you want to sell a car on Whatnot, I would love to support that ambition — and actually believe that somebody will one day. But it also means that in order to provide a great buying and selling experience, I have to work out how to ship a car across the country, whereas currently, I’m shipping a sweater. And so we really zero in on things like, “How do we make sure that before we’re expanding into those categories, we have a really excellent product offering for both buyers and sellers?”

We started in a single category, Funko Pops. Today, we’re in more than 240 categories, and I expect that that number will only keep climbing

Whatnot launched four years before TikTok Shop entered the U.S. market, but TikTok has gained a ton of ground in the short time it’s been around. Meanwhile, marketplaces like Poshmark and Shein have introduced live shopping elements. What differentiates Whatnot’s platform from its competitors?
The live format isn’t unique to us. But we really set ourselves apart by creating a space that allows sellers to build their businesses their way. The idea of supporting multiple different types of formats, whether it’s buy-it-now options, sudden death auctions, multi-week timed auctions or flash sales, is all about creating a space where any type of business can succeed, as opposed to trying to force everybody to adapt to a single set of standards. Live selling isn’t just an add-on for us — it’s core to our platform, and that specialization gives us an edge.

If TikTok is banned in the U.S., how ambitious or hopeful are you that Whatnot can fill the gap left behind? Or is Whatnot’s audience different from TikTok’s?
I am hopeful and ambitious as to Whatnot’s capacity.  I just hope that this situation is resolved quickly because there are small businesses and real sellers who are trying to make a living, and we want to make sure that they’re thought of through this. We hope that many of them will find a home on Whatnot because we think it is the best place to be a seller on the internet. 

In October, Whatnot introduced a customizable loyalty program. How is that impacting sales on the platform so far?
One of the things I’ve heard from some of our sellers is that they’re starting to see buyers actually ask them to go and cross-list a thing onto Whatnot so that they can buy it here because they want the status and loyalty points, even if they can shop from that seller in multiple places. Ultimately, when buyers are changing their behavior in order to deepen their relationship with the seller, that means that that seller is going to have protracted future business.

Marketplace news to know

• Walmart has partnered with Chinese delivery app Meituan and will have its items featured on the platform.
• A new survey says that TikTok Shop has eclipsed other players like Shein and Sephora in popularity.
• Amazon plans to invest more than $23 billion in an Ohio data center.

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