How Wish Built (and Fumbled) a Dollar Store for the Internet

The number of users on Wish has plummeted, and its stock price has dropped. Former employees point to an emphasis on short-term growth over customer service. From a report: There were unbelievable bargains on 'bestdeeal9,' a store hosted on the e-commerce platform Wish, including a $2,700 smart TV being sold for $1 and a gaming computer advertised for $1.30. But none of the offers were real, and Wish knew it. The company, an online novelty emporium that had more than $2 billion in sales last year by dangling hard-to-believe discounts, created 'bestdeeal9' as an experiment. Listings that had been removed for violating Wish policies were reposted on 'bestdeeal9' and used in part to track whether shoppers complained when their orders never arrived. Employees working on the project repeatedly pushed executives to take down the store, arguing that it was both illegal and unethical, according to three employees familiar with the project who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss company matters. More than 213,000 people made purchases from the store, according to an internal document reviewed by The New York Times, though the document did not say how many received their items.

Tarek Fahmy, then the senior vice president of engineering in charge of the project, ended it in 2020 after it operated for several months, the employees said. Mr. Fahmy, who has since left Wish, did not respond to requests for comment. Wish declined to comment on 'bestdeeal9.' Several employees said 'bestdeeal9' is indicative of the kind of practices -- giving priority to short-term growth over customer service -- that initially turned Wish into an advertising and retail behemoth but have now left it desperately trying to right itself. Since its founding in 2010, Wish had many of the hallmarks of a classic Silicon Valley success story: started by a young coder and his college friend, rumored to have turned down a $10 billion acquisition offer from Amazon and described by Recode as an app 'that could be the next Walmart.' It developed a reputation as the dollar store of the internet, shipping odd gimcracks and thingamajigs directly from vendors in China. It blitzed shoppers with viral online ads for $1 plastic tongue clamps, $3 'leather face diapers' for cats and a $2 handful of worms.

Peter Szulczewski, the company's former chief executive, once compared Wish's success to Donald J. Trump's 2016 election victory, explaining that both the company and the candidate had appealed to 'the invisible half' of Americans who were routinely overlooked by political pundits and Silicon Valley elites. But Wish squandered its early promise, according to interviews with nine former employees. Deceptive experiments like 'bestdeeal9' drove customers away, as did low product standards and unreliable shipping. When the rising cost of ads forced it to scale back its marketing, the company struggled to attract new shoppers. Wish is now scrambling to turn itself around. The company declined to make its newly hired crop of executives available but said in a statement that 'over the past six months, Wish has undergone a massive transformation.' The company said: 'We have already seen significant traction and remain committed to executing against our priorities and building a long-term platform for growth.'

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