Exclusive Q&A: Wish outlines ‘three pillars’ of e-commerce success

Senior Editor, Technology

4/6/2023

Wish has a plan to improve performance.

E-commerce platform Wish is following a multi-faceted approach to improving satisfaction for both buyers and sellers.

Chain Store Age recently spoke with Joe Yan, CEO of Wish and Vivian Liu, CFO and COO of Wish, about the company’s efforts to promote e-commerce sales growth by focusing on what it sees as three crucial pillars of its business. Wish recently hosted its first-ever digital sales extravaganza, known as “Wishmas 330.”

How does Wish plan to promote growth in your business?
Joe Yan. We are taking a streamlined, strategic focus on three key pillars of our business. The first one is improving the consumer experience. Wish offers a selection of affordable products. But we need to balance a competitive price and the quality of the product.

Another part of the customer experience is the shipping cost and shipping time. Wish has often heard our customers say we are very competitive price, but the shipping time still takes too long, or the shipping cost is too high. So for our first strategic pillar, we want to focus on improving product quality as well as the shipping time or shipping costs the issue right to improve our consumer experience.

The second pillar is improving our relationship with our merchants. Wish operates on an e-commerce marketplace model. Merchants are very active on our platform, but we don't have many ways that we can engage them very deeply. In the back end and also in the front end, Wish needs to enable and empower our merchants to have a better way to work with us more closely. That can benefit the consumer, because it lets merchants provide more attractive deals on the platform.

The third pillar is our operational efficiency initiative. Part of this was building our logistics stability. We are also trying to diversify our marketing channels and use more of the paid marketing channel, as well as drive user growth through the unpaid marketing channel, such as incentive rewards and email notifications.

Have you seen any results so far?
Vivian Liu: The net promoter score (NPS) from some of our user surveys is double from when we first started on this journey a few months ago. Our customers are telling us they like their experiences a lot more and they're much more satisfied with them. They're much more satisfied with the shipping time and product quality.

Wish also conducted a separate survey of our merchants. That score has been improving very steadily since we started the turnaround, as well. You can see more and more revenues are contributed by the premier merchants, and that's what you want to see. The more successful the good merchants become, the more successful Wish becomes and the more satisfied our users will be.

Can you discuss the Wish rebranding effort in more detail?
Vivian Liu: We launched a rebrand last year and I think we did a really nice job; the logo had a great makeover. Based on feedback, the new logo attracts not only existing customers, but also some of the younger buyers are starting to notice Wish through the rebranding campaign.

How does Wish differentiate itself from other e-commerce retailers?
Vivian Liu: Wish is a mobile-first e-commerce platform, with 90% of our user activity from mobile devices. This is something different from the other e-commerce players.

The other point I want to make is that we have 40% of our users based out of Europe, and so we will be we were building a lot of localized supply strategy and demand generation solutions for the European and North American markets.

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