Whatnot

In Kearney, Nebraska, a town of about 34,000, Bjorn Bergstrom built one of the top coin businesses on Whatnot from the basement of his shop. He started in 2023 to get through a slow stretch for the storefront. Four years in, he employs around 30 people and moved over $8 million in coins in his best month this year. People don't come back for the inventory alone. Bergstrom can tell you where a coin came from and why it's worth caring about, and he calls his regulars by name. The buyers who return have come to know one another as well, and over time the chat has grown into a community that shows up for each other as much as for him. #LiveShopping #Coins https://lnkd.in/gyZNKdTb

Gaines Family Farmstead was the first pet brand to go live on Whatnot, and the team has been growing their business live ever since. Like a lot of sellers, they run their store on Shopify. Before it connected to Whatnot, every sale meant entering inventory by hand, which limited how often they could go live. Once the two synced automatically, Gaines went from about 10 hours a week of live shows to nearly 30, with room to grow. More time live means more selling, faster product feedback, and clearer visibility into profit and shipping along the way. "Because of this Shopify integration, I can now confidently say that Whatnot is our fastest-growing, and arguably most powerful, sales channel." — Dewar Gaines, Owner of Gaines Family Farmstead Live shows are also feeding the rest of the business. Four Gaines Pet products that started as Whatnot exclusives are now carried in more than 1,000 stores nationwide. Three more, designed and tested entirely through live shows, hit retail this August. Work that once took six months and tens of thousands of dollars now takes 90 days or less.

One small change cut the cost of an AI coding task by up to 30%, with no drop in quality. Think of a chef making a soufflé with all the right ingredients but no recipe. An expert might nail it in a few tries. A beginner gets there too, but burns through a lot of eggs to get there. Our AI coding tools were the beginner. Every time they hit an error, they'd keep guessing and retrying until something worked, and the cost piled up. So one of our engineers handed the tool the recipe, pointing it straight to what matters instead of letting it improvise. Same result, a fraction of the waste. If you're an AI or ML engineer who's drawn to the messy, unsolved parts of building with agents, we're hiring: careers.whatnot.com https://lnkd.in/g3y9x96s #LiveShopping #Hiring #ML

A lot of pundits have been forecasting the demise of shopping and the rise of agentic commerce. Our CPO Tom Verrilli thinks they've got it backwards. Writing for LBC in the UK, he makes the case that the best parts of shopping were never a task to hand off. You browse to figure out what you want, you ask questions, you go to stores because of their highly curated selection, and you trust the people who know their products. That's why more than 70% of retail in the UK is still in-person, and it's exactly what live shopping brings online. Whatnot grew 281% last year in the UK because it focuses on using AI to help sellers run their businesses efficiently, not to replace people with bots. https://lnkd.in/giWEjfnQ #LiveShopping

Our sellers just hit one billion orders. When we launched in 2019 as a Funko Pop marketplace, most people had never heard of live shopping. Less than seven years later, we've grown from a single category into hundreds, and reached one billion orders. Every one of those orders started the same way: a seller going live around something they love, and a buyer choosing to show up. @theghqcrew, a golf seller in West Texas, said it best: "Whatnot validated that a small golf shop could build a national community, create jobs, and thrive by serving people well." Thank you to everyone who's been part of the first billion. It’s just the beginning. https://lnkd.in/gxaYcCg4 #LiveShopping

One handbag seller on Whatnot has moved more than 10,000 luxury bags in the last two years. That's the kind of business taking shape now that fashion has become the largest category on the platform, with more than 12 million fashion orders every month. Our CPO Tom Verrilli talked to Glossy about what's pulling sellers, buyers, and brands toward live shopping. https://lnkd.in/ec_y38zC #LiveShopping #Fashion

Substack has become one of the places where culture actually happens, built by writers with communities who show up for them. That's exactly what Whatnot is built around too. It's why we're part of Substack's inaugural brand partnerships cohort and excited to work more closely with the writers and creators building there. https://lnkd.in/g3dR6yBg #Substack #LiveShopping

What if shopping didn't have to feel so transactional? That was the question at the center of Grant LaFontaine's conversation at Fortune Brainstorm Tech this week. His take: e-commerce got efficient and lost the human part along the way. Live commerce puts it back. You see who you're buying from, ask questions in the moment, and feel part of a community instead of clicking through a checkout flow. That's the whole point of live. Thanks to Fortune for having us. #FortuneBrainstormTech

Fashion is now Whatnot's biggest category by order volume, driving nearly 2x more orders than Sports and Memorabilia. The next chapter is about helping all that demand convert, and it starts somewhere you might not expect: the listing. On Whatnot, the show is the storefront. A seller holds up an item, describes it, answers questions live, and you don't always need much more. It's how sellers drove $8B in live sales last year, most on a quick "listen for size." But as millions of new buyers discover live shopping, a little more detail goes a long way. Most make their first purchase on a detailed listing. New listing templates are a big part of the answer: tell buyers the brands, sizes, or colors you've got in a few seconds, then run items the same fast way you always have. And the more sellers use them, the smarter they get, suggesting better titles, categories, even the right shipping profile automatically. Tom Verrilli, our Chief Product Officer, shares what's changing and what's ahead. Read more here: https://lnkd.in/gy_ZSNNG #LiveShopping

Lukas (@themunchesvault) is a Wisconsin-based Pokémon singles seller who turned a side hustle into a full-time Whatnot business in three months. He grew from under 2,000 items sold in his first month to nearly 12,000 by month five. It started when he found his childhood Pokémon binder and rediscovered his love for the hobby. He began collecting again, and selling duplicates to fund new purchases. Before Whatnot, that meant constant DMs, chasing payments, and vending at local card shows where sales rose and fell with foot traffic. "All I did was go live for 15 to 20 hours this week and I made more than I did in an entire month of working at my old job." His first show brought in over $600, and within two weeks he was out-earning his full-time job. He adjusted his card mix in real time based on chat, kept his shows fast-paced and energetic, and watched first-time buyers make up over half of every show. Three months in, he'd hired three people to keep up.