121–130 of 153 posts
Huh, I've never heard of this but went to the home page and it sells .. junk? Some of the products remind me of those "THIS ONE WEIRD TRICK" ads
Last year me and a friend played a game of "wishing". Spend $30-50 on cheap crap on Wish, and the shipping is so slow that you end up getting surprises in the mail the rest of the year.
I find it kinda fun to get a new bike light or little gadget that I forgot I ordered.
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Define a "tech IPO" for me. I'll wait.
Know this mostly isn't looking for an answer, but I think HN typically means something along the lines of: "one with a significant development arm of their employees/business that is crucial to the company's success" So any company run off an app or website that's complex and well made is probably a "tech company" even if it's in the business of cars, e-commerce, or widgets. There's no hard and fast rule here of cour…
Well it is a misnomer and that's precisely the point.
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Define a "tech IPO" for me. I'll wait.
If every human stopped working at the company for a day the product would still work (not a meatspace product). The company will typically have a high GAAP gross margin.
So an automobile company?
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My credit card company (in the UK) has blocked AliExpress but not Wish. This doesn't make me want to use Wish, but maybe it's a reason why others would prefer it over AliExpress.
> My credit card company (in the UK) has blocked AliExpress That's completely outrageous. What could their rationale possibly be?
If there's one IPO that I'm not excited about, is this one. This is a shit model. And I want to apologize in advance to any Wish employees that may be here and that are surely doing hard work to build the logistics and consumer layers of this business. This is a business built on top of cheap Chinese goods, subsidized shipping and low customer expectations. High transaction volume with very low margins, and totally e…
> just a fancy wrapper on top of AliExpress and dropbox is just a fancy wrapper on top of ... and airbnb is just a fancy wrapper on top of ...
From p153: > Our advertising costs to acquire new users constituted 96% of our sales and marketing expenses, and sales and marketing expenses constituted 91% of our operating expenses, in 2019. That's pretty astounding. In 2019 they spent $1.46 billion on sales and marketing, of which $1.41 billion went to new user acquisition. According to the quarterly breakdown of metrics on p108, their LTM Active Buyers went from…
If you had a scalable channel you would expect to accrue more customers as old cohorts retained customers, but this instead just looks like exchanging ad dollars for one, two-time purchase customers which is why the ad spend is so high and the life blood of the company.
Hard to imagine this company not getting hammered by the street unless they have a one-time lift from COVID shopping, but long term hard to bullish on this company especially when comparing their S&M expense vs R&D expense.
I totally get the Wish hate but I don’t think most here realize why it’s so popular. My family in the Midwest loves wish because they purchase from there knowing the quality isn’t going to be superb. My mom buys random things from them like clothes, jewelry, and random appliances for literally $5. She’s willing to wait three weeks to get her stuff because it’s such a good deal. My dad was able to get a quality DSLR f…
> My dad was able to get a quality DSLR for $50. No he wasn't.
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Define a "tech IPO" for me. I'll wait.
A company whose revenue is primarily derived from a technology characterized by high margin, high scalability and low fixed costs. One could also say that such a technology should be the primary differentiator for the product. The products therefore tend towards software and hardware as applied to a pre-existing market, but that's not an ironclad rule.
And things like Wish clearly only if we're talking gross margin, not operating margins. The amount of ads they're running is crazy.
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> just a fancy wrapper on top of AliExpress and dropbox is just a fancy wrapper on top of ... and airbnb is just a fancy wrapper on top of ...
The problem with Wish (US) being a wrapper on top of AliExpress is that Wish now charges you state sales tax. Ali does not and I doubt they ever will. For pricier items, it can make a difference.
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A company whose revenue is primarily derived from a technology characterized by high margin, high scalability and low fixed costs. One could also say that such a technology should be the primary differentiator for the product. The products therefore tend towards software and hardware as applied to a pre-existing market, but that's not an ironclad rule.
So for example not Tesla (high fixed costs, low margin), not Uber (negative margin), and not Amazon (the retail part is low margin; AWS actually fits). And things like Wish clearly only if we're talking gross margin, not operating margins. The amount of ads they're running is crazy.
I don't really think Wish is a tech company though.