Whatnot's Live Shopping Platform Surpasses $8B in Transactions

Six years ago, Grant LaFontaine and Logan Head rented a house in Phoenix, locked themselves in to build live video infrastructure from scratch, and sold $5,000 worth of Funko Pops on Whatnot's first show. Fast forward to last year: sellers on Whatnot generated over $8B in live sales, and Whatnot now holds nearly 60% of the live shopping market in the West. Jennifer Conrad at Inc. Magazine talked to our founders, sellers like Wild Ginger Vintage and Pursuit Farms, investors, and analysts for this profile on how Whatnot made live shopping finally click in the West and where it goes from here. A few things from the piece that we think about a lot: you can't fake community, the next decade of commerce will be built on real human connection rather than algorithms, and dogfooding the product (every employee goes live once a quarter, answers customer service requests, gets a monthly buying budget) leads to better decisions. From Grant LaFontaine: "If your culture recedes, you end up doing things like every other company, and you're not going to be, by definition, an exceptional company." https://lnkd.in/gwnK_nCF #LiveShopping

Before joining Whatnot, I'd read the line "we eat our own dog food" in plenty of company handbooks. It usually meant nothing. Here it means every Whatnaut goes live and sells items themselves regularly. We all answer customer service tickets and we all get a monthly budget to actually shop on the platform. Our founders included. It changes how decisions get made, because nobody is detached from the experience our sellers and buyers are having. The pace here is wild but the trade is being part of something genuinely new that's impacting so many people and businesses' lives. I'll take that trade every time.

Like everyone on this platform, we have thoughts… So, Oust is moving our convo from the group chat to here. Everyone I know (and admittedly myself) is obsessed with online drops right now. Brands like Rhode, Parke, and Elwood are taking inspiration from what has historically lived in sneaker culture, dropping limited runs that sell out in minutes. Except this time, people aren’t lining up on Fairfax. They’re queuing online. Shopping online has become an event, transforming consumers into participants. The brands doing it right have figured out that it’s actually community that creates conversion. To take it a step further… if you’re not exploring live selling yet, you’re already behind. And in six months, you’ll start to feel it. Live selling converts at 8–12% vs. traditional e-commerce’s 2–4 percent. That’s not something that’s trendy, that’s a wake-up call for brands. But the how matters so much. If this got your wheels spinning, our DMs are open. Ok byeee 👛

I was enjoying my last bite of a product I've loved buying for years because they announced they were closing shop. It was a real head scratcher moment for me.. I've seen some really great brands come and go over the years. I know there are several reasons for it, but are there any strong outliers (besides the product not being great)? I recently spoke with a founder that shut down, and it really got me thinking. Asked him what his biggest regret was. He said "we were so focused on acquiring customers." "We never built anything for them to belong to." Is that it? Are the ones that stick around have a brand community for their fans to belong to?

Proud to see our Managing Director of Technology Research, John Harmon, CFA Harmon, quoted in this Inc. Magazine. piece on Whatnot's rise. Live shopping in the U.S. has had plenty of false starts — but Whatnot's numbers tell a different story. $8 billion in platform sales in 2025, up from $3 billion the year before, and 20 million new accounts created in 2025 alone. As John notes in the article, the overall U.S. e-commerce market sits at around $1.3 trillion. Live shopping is still a small slice — but it's growing fast, and Whatnot is pulling well ahead of the pack. Worth a read for anyone watching where commerce is heading. 🔗 https://hubs.la/Q04hdhLv0 #LiveShopping #RetailTech #Ecommerce #CoresightResearch #Whatnot

73% of Gen Alpha would rather shop in stores than online. Here's how brands are bringing young shoppers back to the mall. https://lnkd.in/ggTr4BDC

2,700+ brands are listed on Blinkit. Only 491 actually sell Which one are you? That means over 84% of brands are essentially invisible, paying platform fees, running ads, and wondering why the channel isn't working. Here’s the uncomfortable truth no one says out loud: Being listed is not the same as being present. Most brands failing on Quick Commerce don’t have a product problem. They have a visibility problem. They're going OOS at dark stores they can't even track, while the algorithm silently punishes them for inconsistent availability. The moment inventory drops: • Search rankings fall • Discoverability declines • Ads become inefficient • Competitors take your shelf And the scary part? Most brands still forecast demand using city-level assumptions when Q-commerce demand behaves at pin-code level. So what happens? A brand goes OOS on a Friday night. Drops 3 spots in ranking. Spends more on ads to recover. Still has no clue which dark store caused the problem. Meanwhile, the 491 brands winning on Blinkit? They’re not always bigger. They’re just consistently available where demand actually exists. That’s the difference. Quick commerce is no longer just a distribution game. It’s an availability and visibility game. What do you think hurts brands more on Q-commerce today? • Poor discoverability • Bad forecasting • Dark-store level OOS Curious to hear what operators and founders are seeing firsthand. #QuickCommerce #FMCG #Blinkit #DarkStore #Ecommerce #RetailTech

Dumpsters, Wedding Dresses, and Houses. The wild new world of live social shopping. People are no longer just buying products online. They’re buying stories. A wedding dress abandoned beside a dumpster becomes valuable because millions become emotionally curious about its history. A livestream house tour sells a lifestyle before it sells square footage. Vintage sellers move inventory faster than major retailers because audiences crave uniqueness, urgency, and human connection. Commerce has changed. Shopping used to be rational: compare prices, evaluate quality, make a purchase. Now it’s emotional, social, and theatrical. Live social shopping works because it combines: • entertainment • storytelling • scarcity • community • instant gratification People enter livestreams for fun… and leave with purchases they never planned to make. The algorithm replaced the shopping mall. And creators replaced brands. That’s the real shift happening beneath the surface. We are entering an economy where attention creates value faster than manufacturing does. A random object with a compelling narrative can outperform a perfectly designed product with no emotional connection. The future of commerce may not belong to the biggest companies. It may belong to the people who know how to hold human attention in real time. .. #SocialCommerce #LiveShopping #CreatorEconomy #DigitalMarketing #Ecommerce #FutureOfCommerce #AttentionEconomy #Storytelling #Branding #RetailTrends #Entrepreneurship #ContentMarketing #Innovation #ConsumerBehavior #LinkedIn

"A brand has a voice, a personality, they invest so much in building a connection"... with their customers, only to have it commandeered by marketplace platforms who use their sales data to create their own dupes and white label products (yes, we're talking to you, Amazon). But for premium and luxury brands who have tried and lost on this hill, The Mall Street might be the game changer the industry has been waiting for. We sat down with Chief Growth Officer Loree Lash-Valencia and Chief Brand Officer Claudia Summers to learn about the inner workings of their new digital mall (it's so much more than a marketplace), offering brands the benefits of consumer facing community and operational economies of scale, without surrendering control of their brand. Or their data. For premium and luxury brands: can marketplaces truly move from loss leaders to acquisition engines? Tune in to find out!! #topretailexperts #storeblind #TheMallStreet

ShopHouzz, the standalone marketplace launched by Houzz less than a year ago, has announced it is shutting down operations. https://lnkd.in/gaUKg23N