When Jet.com sold to Walmart in 2016, commentators remarked that there was no space for new ecommerce apps, in a market with Amazon and eBay. Two years later, ecommerce platform Wish was the most downloaded shopping application worldwide and the third largest e-commerce marketplace in the United States. Wish was originally founded as wishlist app, in which users could create lists of their favourite products. To help monetise the site, Wish added a similar products feature and began partnerin...| Business of Apps
Shein is, by some measures, the largest online only fashion company, which may be a surprise to those who have never heard of the app. Originally a portal to buy wedding dresses, Shein branched out into general womenswear in the early 2010s and to all types of fashion by the mid-2010s, although the vast majority of its customers are still women. It is now the leader of a new generation of fast fashion that puts Zara and H&M to shame, producing thousands of new items to match the current trend...| Business of Apps
In 2015, IIT Delhi graduates Vidit Aatrey and Sanjeev Barnwal launched a fashion app startup called Fashnear, featuring on-demand delivery from local shops. Take-up was slow, and the founders resorted to picketing potential buyers outside of shops. The startup failed, but the following year Aatrey and Barnwal revived the platform and renamed it Meesho. Meesho has an emphasis on social media use, particularly Facebook and WhatsApp. The company realised that small retailers were already using t...| Business of Apps
eBay is an e-commerce platform, at first only providing customer-to-customer auction services, expanding into business-to-consumer shortly afterwards. In the 2000’s, eBay went on a spending spree that saw it taking ownership of PayPal, Skype and Stubhub, although it has since relinquished ownership of all three businesses. It is one of the few success stories of the dot-com bubble, which eBay fought through after going public in September 1998. By 2001, it was considered the world’s larg...| Business of Apps