Whatnot

In early 2020, a big day for Whatnot meant 30 orders. Our CEO Grant LaFontaine and co-founder Logan Head packed every one by hand in the living room of a rented house in Phoenix. Today the platform averages a couple million orders a day, and it just crossed a billion total. Grant joined Allie Garfinkle on Fortune's Term Sheet to unpack how a niche collectibles app grew into the largest live shopping platform in the West. He makes the case for starting small and specific instead of broad, the idea that the best consumer businesses grow out of the corners of the market nobody else is serving well, and explains why live shopping holds sellers more accountable than a static listing ever could. Catch the full conversation with Fortune below. https://lnkd.in/gPTVsJua #LiveShopping

The best way to understand live shopping is to try it yourself. You open a sealed box of trading cards on camera, and your whole chat leans in with you, card by card, to see what's inside. That feeling, sharing something you love in real time with people who are into it too, is the heart of Whatnot. So when Kai Cenat, the biggest streamer on Twitch, hosted his 5-day Streamer University bootcamp for 120+ up-and-coming creators, we set up The Break Room, a spot to take a break and break packs. Over five days, nearly 80 creators went live on Whatnot, giving every card away to their chat with their communities right there for it. New faces, new communities, same reason people keep coming back to Whatnot: it's a place to find your people, share what you love, and have a blast doing it. #LiveShopping #StreamerU

Not long ago, making a career in cards usually meant a storefront or a spot on the show circuit. Even online, you were mostly listing into a search box and hoping the right buyer found it. Live commerce changed that. Now anyone with the knowledge and the drive can sell live and build a community that keeps coming back. Across Whatnot, 1 in 8 sellers do this full-time, and more people are getting in every day: three in five sports card sellers on Whatnot made their first sale on the platform this year. Dakota is one of them. She came to Whatnot in 2021 to resell sneakers, discovered the world of live card shows, and fell in love with it. Now 26, she runs a dozen sports channels on Whatnot with more than 50 employees, and sold nearly $65 million on Whatnot last year. She's since expanded well beyond sports, and her coins and money business has already sold nearly $20 million on Whatnot. Ahead of the biggest weekend in the hobby, we wrote about how that community made cards a career: https://lnkd.in/gwevGT-9 The National Sports Collectors Convention runs July 29 through August 2, and hundreds of Whatnot sellers will be going live all week directly from the showroom floor. Wherever you are, you can tune in, jump in the chat, and shop right alongside them. #LiveShopping #TheNational #SportsCards

Trust is at the core of every transaction on Whatnot, and it's something we're constantly working to strengthen. Today, we're sharing more about one part of that work: how we're tackling shill bidding, where someone places a bid with no real intent to buy, simply to drive up the price. Over the past six months, we have: - Reduced shill bidding activity by nearly 80% - Increased our proactive detection signals by 5x - Cut community reports of shill bidding by 45% These results reflect continued investment in better detection, stronger safeguards, and the work our Trust & Safety team does every day to protect the marketplace. We'll continue sharing more about that work and the progress we're making. Read more: https://lnkd.in/g_pyZsM4 #LiveShopping

Whatnot is already home to people who love soccer (or football, depending on who you ask), so when a moment like the World Cup comes around, the community packs into live shows to celebrate their teams, talk through every match, and track down the jerseys they've been eyeing. Soccer jersey searches jumped nearly 230% during the tournament, with about three times as many people searching as the month before. And loyalty shifted fast as demand followed the bracket: Mexico and USA led early on host-country energy, then the knockouts changed everything. Norway searches roughly quintupled as Haaland caught fire, while Spain, France, and Argentina all grew as they kept winning. Nostalgia ran deep this summer, too. Vintage jerseys climbed nearly 70% in a single month as collectors chased down Pelé, Ronaldinho, and Beckham. Whatnot seller Tom Rainsford of RetroFootballShirts put it simply: buyers "want to hear the stories behind the vintage kits, and see the items up close before they buy." That connection is why more fashion items are sold on Whatnot than any other category. https://lnkd.in/gESGDwWP #LiveShopping #WorldCup

Our Seattle team has been growing fast, and last night we got a room full of the city's builders, operators, and sellers together to talk about live shopping and what it's doing for local businesses. More than 20,000 sellers across Seattle are on Whatnot, and in a region that's long been a trading card games stronghold, sellers here do 3x the sales you'd expect for a market this size. The engineering behind this is difficult work. Auctions resolve in seconds, inventory exists for minutes, and over 560,000 hours of live video flow through our systems every week that have to understand and respond to it as it happens. All of that is for the sellers using the platform, and the best part of the night was hearing from them. Nights like this are a reminder of why we stay close to the people using what we make. We build better when we do. Seattle's a big part of where we're headed, with teams across engineering, AI, and ML based here and hiring. If you want to work on hard problems for people whose businesses depend on you getting it right, check out careers.whatnot.com for open roles. #Hiring #Seattle #Engineering #LiveShopping

Today, we're announcing that Whatnot has acquired Shaped, a machine learning company specializing in recommendation systems, search, and personalization. AI already powers discovery across Whatnot, helping buyers find the live shows, sellers, and products they'll love while helping sellers reach the right audience and grow their businesses. By bringing the Shaped team together with our existing AI organization, we're accelerating work already underway and deepening our investment in AI-powered discovery. We're excited to welcome the Shaped team to Whatnot and continue building the future of live commerce. https://lnkd.in/gMsjVJuB #ML #LiveShopping

Today, we're announcing that Whatnot has acquired Shaped, a machine learning company specializing in recommendation systems, search, and personalization. AI already powers discovery across Whatnot, helping buyers find the live shows, sellers, and products they'll love while helping sellers reach the right audience and grow their businesses. By bringing the Shaped team together with our existing AI organization, we're accelerating work already underway and deepening our investment in AI-powered discovery. We're excited to welcome the Shaped team to Whatnot and continue building the future of live commerce. https://lnkd.in/gMsjVJuB #ML #LiveShopping

Casey hadn't thought about trading cards in twenty years. Then his son opened a pack of football cards, and it got him excited again. Soon the whole family was digging through boxes together at the kitchen table. Casey and his wife decided to try selling on Whatnot. He had built online businesses before, and he could see where live shopping was heading. They ran early shows from the living room with almost no setup, built on late-night hangout energy and shared card nostalgia. That's where it took off. In under five months, Krunk_cards grew to 22,000 followers and became a seven-figure business, known for shows where regulars come to stick around as much as to buy. Casey brought on three employees and started building distributor relationships to secure product. "People always ask me how to get started on Whatnot, and I tell them the same thing: just push the live button. Don't overthink it. Go for it." #LiveShopping #Sports

With the FIFA World Cup in full swing, sports jerseys are trending on Whatnot, but jerseys are just one signal. With nearly one million searches happening on Whatnot every day, buyers are constantly telling us what they're looking for. Our new Top Trends feature turns that into a live view of demand as it builds. Here's what it does: - Shows what buyers are searching for across the marketplace in real time - Updates dynamically as marketplace activity shifts, so the view stays current - Surfaces demand before it becomes obvious, so sellers can move early When a moment like the World Cup sends interest climbing, the sellers who spot it first can feature jerseys and related gear while attention is at its peak. Top Trends is one of several updates this month for sellers to find demand faster. https://lnkd.in/gfgcek37 #LiveShopping #WorldCup