User:Reinako/sandbox/Wish (company)

ContextLogic Inc., doing business as Wish, is an online e-commerce company. It was founded in 2010 by Peter Szulczewski (CEO) and Danny Zhang (CTO), former programmers at Google and Yahoo. In 2017, the Wish mobile shopping app claimed over 100 million users on the iOS and Android platforms. Similar to eBay, small businesses and manufacturers on Wish sell goods directly to consumers.

History
In 2010, Wish began as an app where users would create wish lists for their desired items and the company would approach merchants to order that particular amount of a product. They also earned revenue with a Pay-per-click model by advertising on Facebook. In 2013, Wish became an electronic commerce site after asking merchants to host their products directly on the Wish app, with Wish taking a portion of each sale.

Alibaba and Amazon
In late 2015, Business Insider reported that Amazon and Alibaba had approached Wish with acquisition offers for $10 billion but Wish rejected the offers, believing that they could build the startup to at least $100 billion.

Popularity
The shopping app claims to have over 300 million users around the world. Wish consistently stays at #1 on shopping apps on both Apple and Android app stores, according to an app analytics platform called App Annie. Wish is the largest advertiser on Facebook and spends nearly $100 million a year on Facebook ads alone.

Wish became the most-downloaded shopping app in the USA in 2017. Over the course of the year, across the iOS App Store and Google Play store, Wish had 32.5 million U.S. downloads compared to Amazon’s 29.2 million.

Partnerships
In 2017, Wish expanded into high-profile partnerships by sponsoring the professional boxing match Mayweather vs. McGregor. During that year, Wish signed a $30-42 million deal to become a sponsor of the Los Angeles Lakers. The partnership is a three-year contract that features the Wish logo as a patch on Lakers' jerseys.

In 2018, Wish announced its integration with multichannel e-commerce platform, Expandly.

Products and services
Wish.com's products include apparel, consumer electronics, beauty products, home decor and baby products. The website runs additional platforms for particular products such as Geek (electronics-focused), Mama (family-oriented), Cute (beauty-focused), and Home (decor-focused). The company also offers services such as the Wish Outlet, which sells overstocked name-brand goods at a reduced price, and Wish Express which offers faster shipping.

Funding
The startup has raised over $1B in funding from several venture capital firms such as Temasek, DST Global, GGV Capital, Founders Fund, and Jerry Yang’s AME Cloud Ventures.

Controversy
Despite being very inexpensive, many customers have had poor experiences with Wish and other direct-from-China sites, including defective products (particularly counterfeits), "products paid for and never received, and requests for returns and refunds ignored". By contrast, major-established North American retailers that import from China are more expensive but provide quality control and money-back guarantees.

Wish, like Amazon and other online sales websites do not have to collect sales tax on items sold in most American states, since most sellers from China are third-party sellers. While numerous states are currently fighting this practice in court, it is considered difficult to enforce the law against companies based in China than those with a U.S. presence.