The $22 Billion Live Shopping Spree (feat. Armand Wilson, VP at Whatnot)

0:00Armand Wilson:Welcome to Crater Upload, your Crater Economy podcast. I'm Lauren Schnipper. And I'm Joshua Cohen. Lauren. What? I like your exasperated what's. Always. We are going to see each other in person. Next week. In Los Angeles. In Los Angeles. We're going to be at SOCOM, which is the Social Commerce Conference founded by Max Benader and Orca, which is the live shopping company that he started. and this is the second year. And, you know, that, you know, one of the founders of our, you know, creator economy, Hannah Hart once said to me, I never go to a first year con because you never know how it's going to go.

0:37Armand Wilson:I went to a first year con at SoCon last year and SoCom, even though it was a con. And it was great. They did a great job for first year. Like it really was solid guests. They had like the CMO gap there, which is like a big get year one. the food was great. I remember the lunch was phenomenal. And honestly, food makes a big difference. I don't care what you say. It was fantastic. It was a great event. The person who interviewed Fabio Latouris, who's the Gap CMO, was fantastic too. He could have prepared a little bit more, like at all. But yes, ladies and gentlemen, we're talking about Josh Cohen, who has basically made it his, I don't know, life's mission to never prepare for anything.

1:18Armand Wilson:It's not accurate. I prepared very well. It was a fantastic interview. And so good, so Lauren, that we got invited back. We did. We did. We're invited back. This time, though, in Bigger Than Better. So we're doing the podcast live there. We're going to be interviewing some of the folks that are going to be on stage. And then each of us individually are going to be like moderating a panel. My panel is going to be just a little teaser, 1045 AM. The Creator Engine Powering Revenue, Reach, and Retail. And I've got like a banger of a panel. We've got A.L. Bommel. We've got Amy Nevin, Madison Weaver, Noah Swimmer, RJ LaRess.

1:55Armand Wilson:I mean, this is going to be a banger of a panel. We're going to talk a lot about affiliates and how they've just sort of like come back from the dead, but like really have like kind of people are kind of finally recognizing the power of affiliate no matter the size of the creator. And so I'm really excited. Which panel going to be on, Josh? And a great chaser for that that's going to be like, OK, this is the reason I came here to SOCOM is going to be a 255. I'll be moderating a panel from culture to conversion with Damon Berger, who's head of consumer digital engagement at Gap. Stop. Josh Maynard, who's the GM of global e-commerce at Mr.

2:27Beast. And Kritika Pandey, who's the director and digital go to market and experience at Elf Beauty.

2:34Armand Wilson:Yeah, no, that's going to be good. So, yeah, it is Thursday, February 26th. I'm not getting an affiliate link for this, but I think you can still buy tickets. You can totally buy tickets. If you're there, come say hi to us. Definitely. We'll be there all day. Okay, but let's get back to business here. Josh, you have a great interview today. I think we're going to get right to it. Yes, Lauren. I had a fantastic conversation with Armand Wilson, who's the VP of Categories and Expansion at Whatnot. I loved this conversation. Armand has been there for five plus years and is really living and breathing this social commerce and live shopping.

3:10I think I don't want to call it a renaissance, but finally, I think it's come to almost fully realized its potential form that everybody in this ecosystem thought it was going to be. And what that is a big player in that space. The company is valued now at nearly$10 billion. They had two$200 plus million funding rounds in 2025 alone. The latest was in October where they raised$225 million at that$10 billion valuation. Back in January of last year, the valuation was$5 billion. It nearly doubled within the span of 10 months or so. And whatnot also released this state of live selling report where they have some incredible statistics.

3:52him and I get into it and just get into the culture and experience of kind of live shopping and social commerce today. It's a good prelude into SoCom for next week, and I think you'll enjoy it. Arman, thank you so much for coming on Creator Upload. It is a pleasure to have you here. Josh, thanks for having me. Stoked to be here. So I am so intrigued by this social shopping ecosystem and this live shopping industry. I'm really excited to talk to you about and dive into this space. First, I just want to kind of like take a step back and for you to tell me basically what is Whatnot and how would you define your kind of core competitive advantage?

4:30There's TikTok shop, there's Instagram live shopping, YouTube's coming out with its own social shopping feature, and there's obviously traditional marketplaces. Where does Whatnot fit into this mix? Yeah, for sure. Whatnot's a live shopping platform. Really, we're a social commerce platform, but live shopping is like our hero product. We've been around for about six years now. And all we really do is focus on making the best live shopping product possible. So I'd say, to answer your second question, one of our biggest differentiators is we wake up every single day and that's all we think about is how to make the best products for our amazing sellers and also the buyers and communities on the platform.

5:11I think I'll quickly just touch on the founding of whatnot because I think it touches on a bit of like why I think we're a bit different than other platforms and why we've been able to hit the scale. Um, and so yeah, six years ago, whatnot was, if you open up whatnot, it was not a live shopping platform. Six years. Yeah. Um, it was not a live shopping platform. It was a two side marketplace and all we were selling were these little vinyl toys called Funko Pops that you're familiar with them. Um, and so really we were, we were starting as a, as a better way to buy collectible, but really specifically Funko Pops.

5:46And it wasn't that we were going after this big opportunity. It's huge. Now it's very obvious. Look in China, it's a huge industry. But it was less about chasing the opportunity and more about really being deeply ingrained in these communities and trying to solve problems for them. And so the original was like, there's a lot of fraud and buying Funko Pops, a lot of fake Funko Pops. And so we tried to sit in the middle and authenticate the transactions. and it works really well. We got a bunch of traction. But really what kind of had us take off was one day we saw some of our users just going on social media and going live and selling things live, selling Funko Pops live in kind of a janky way.

6:28Like people were bidding in the comments and then he had to like PayPal people outside the platform. But it was super engaging and a bunch of items were sold. And so took a bet on it. One of our co-founders, Logan, locked himself in a room and built the first live products for the course of a couple of weeks. And Grant, our CEO and other co-founder, went live for the first time and sold a bunch of Funko Pops. And it was magical. The community loved it. And so we started really just trying to build an amazing product for Funko Pop sellers. And then we did that for a really long time over the first year of the company.

7:02And then we started launching into different communities. So then we did Pokemon cards and sports cards. Eventually, we got into sneakers and fashion. And now we're in hundreds of categories with the biggest live shopping player in uh north america uk europe now recently australia and it's all kind of because of this idea of just really building for the communities first versus building like kind of a horizontal live shopping products where you can get a bunch of different cool things on there is more just like let's solve for the communities and build in a really authentic way you you're saying all this and you have some of the data to back it up, you all recently issued your whatnot state of live selling report in 2026.

7:42One of the stats I want to point out right now that makes the most sense for this part of our conversation is you found that more than half of surveyed sellers said they generate the majority of their annual sales through this live commerce, live shopping function. And so tell me what the appeal is what is it about live shopping that entices buyers to engage i mean like i come from an era where if i stayed home from school i would watch qvc um for a couple hours a day if i was sick yeah and so like i get it this phenomenon has been around for a while but it hasn't necessarily translated over to the internet um until now ish but like what what's the appeal what what's so compelling about it.

8:23I think when we think about the best parts of buying on whatnot, it's how can we really create the amazing shopping experiences people get in real life. And so imagine going in Soho, New York, imagine walking down to a shop, you walk in, you know what pair of shoes you should buy and you have this amazing interaction with the sales associate and they bring you to the shoe and then you buy that product. And that experience feels more and more rare in today's world. Now you're like waiting in lines and there's a bunch of other hassles. But that's kind of how we felt about it. And so for me, like I've been buying a lot of vintage t-shirts on whatnot, as an example.

8:59And I love that experience because I'll go into a live stream and it's very common for someone that you buy a bunch from, they'll announce me by name. They'll say, what's up, Armand? They'll say, hey, I heard you were asking for those boxing t-shirts the other day. Here's actually this like vintage Muhammad Ali t-shirt in your size. And they'll show you how flowy it is, show you any of the imperfections, talk about the super specific niche things like this is printed on a Hanes tag, which makes this t-shirt more rare. And so to me, the amazing parts of live is you can just add so much more context and it's so much more personalization to the shopping experience.

9:37That's just really hard to get today online on a static product page. And so I think that's the best part of the buying experience. And then I would say on the selling side, the real value prop is like you... Tristan, if you were selling things online, let's say you would list 100 pairs of sneakers on a marketplace. Those would maybe sell casually over the course of the next 30 days. And you generate... You find your shipping label, you ship them out one by one. Whereas on whatnot, you go live for a couple hours, you'll sell 100 pairs of shoes. And then you hit one button, we streamline all the fulfillment side so that all the labels get generated.

10:14and print it out on your behalf. And then you can just ship much quicker. And so really for selling, you can just sell way more things on whatnot than you can anywhere else. And so it usually was for these kind of like social shopping platforms where you had to build up your audience somewhere else and then pour that over to that platform to sell. I mean, this is how Shopify has built up a lot of its business. It's being a storefront for creators who get their audience and their engagement on other platforms and then ported over to the shopping experience. How's it work on whatnot? Has it reached a critical mass where there's just enough people engaged in enough niches on whatnot at any given time that the discovery is where it needs to be for people to sell what they need to sell?

11:00Yeah, 100%. That's one of the areas that we invest the deepest in is our discovery tools and I think one of our specialties. And so really, it's really hard to get a bunch of sellers on the platform, really hard to get a bunch of buyers on the platform. And so once they're there, we want to make sure that like the right people are finding the right streams um and so now it's i mean most of our big sellers if you look at them sellers that are now selling hundreds of millions of dollars of things per year um are homegrown and so they might have had a small social following um but generally the biggest sellers aren't these like big influencers or creators it's folks that um just built built organically like alongside like the rise of whatnot and so um yeah we spent a bunch of money on marketing you know we just did this this activation with Mr.

11:43Beast. And now I think it's like the first time ever where demand is outgrowing 50 % faster than in supply. And so it's like pretty much never been a better time to start a live shopping channel today. Yeah. I'm just rattling off some stats from you guys here too. You said there was over 20 million new accounts created in 2025 with an average user spending 95 minutes per day on the platform. It's crazy. Gross merchandise value of over$8 billion in 2025. That's a lot of products that are moving through whatnot what do you say the new creators who are coming to the platform or like what what's the typical whatnot seller look like honestly super super diverse um and also like each category is like quite diverse itself and so i would say in terms of like broad broad like kind of uh demo it's like you see people that are have a brick and mortar shop uh and they're selling sports cards and they go live.

12:40You see people that traditionally sell online that go live. You have online creators that are going live and selling things. And so, it's really a mix of a bunch of people finding real value and utility out of the platform. And then each category has its own flavor as well. And so, the people that are selling in women's fashion look incredibly different than the people that are selling in comic books as like an example. And is there a point you see when a creator goes from being like kind of a casual seller to a professional merchant on the platform? And if so, kind of like what's that threshold?

13:17One of the things I think that we're like most proud of on the platform and internally when we talk about it a lot is like how many sellers are making a living off of the back of whatnot. And so my team is constantly talking to sellers. It's what we do all day. And when we find those stories of folks that have maybe started off and they turn a hobby or a side project, kind of like a passion project, and they're maybe going live on nights and weekends and kind of moonlighting on whatnot, and then they take that plunge into going full time, it's like something that's like really, really special.

13:50And so I think the stat now is that one in eight sellers are now selling full-time on whatnot. They're scoring about 20 % year over year. And so we're constantly seeing more and more of these folks really being able to build meaningful, sustainable businesses for themselves. And then also like some of these businesses, again, as I mentioned, like some of our bigger sellers start as one or two people operations and they now employ hundreds of people and they're doing hundreds of millions of dollars a year on the platform. And so it's really, I think a lot of people think live shopping may be quite niche, but I think what we're finding is that it's really building huge businesses off the back of the platform.

14:29Yeah, there are recent predictions that say that live commerce will be 10 to 20 % of total e-commerce by the end of this year. And I think for anyone who hasn't been on any of these platforms, that seems like just wild. But for you, from where you stand, like, how does that look? Does that seem about accurate? it uh i mean that number probably seems a little aggressive but um i do think live shopping is getting getting getting quite big i mean use whatnot just as like a proxy and ourself like uh as you mentioned we did over eight billion dollars in sales last last year um which has grown exponentially more than double year over year and this year looks to be even more promising and so um i think live shopping is it's just getting started um some of the things i think get all this excited.

15:14You mentioned the stat of like 95 minutes per day people are using the app. People are really, you know, unlike the buyer side, like people are spending a ton of time in the app. 95 minutes is more than any social platform there is, you know, more than double, some of the big ones. And so they're engaging, they're really finding like value and entertainment out of just enjoying the streams that are happening, but they're also buying and coming back. And so customer retention is over 80 % month over month, which kind of breaks... Both those stats kind of break in these sort of like e-commerce or marketplace, like traditional metrics.

15:49And so... But it also still feels like very much like if you know, you know. And so I think if you're like on whatnot and you know it, you're obsessed with it, you love it, you're telling all of your friends. And it is getting bigger. Over the weekend, we were the number three biggest app in the app store, behind chat, GPT, and CallShe on Super Bowl weekend ahead of peacock on like uh olympic olympic time and so um whatnot in like live shopping is definitely becoming more and more mainstream but i still think there's a huge way to grow yeah i mean if you compare whatnot's average time spent per user to twitches twitches is only slightly higher at like 106 minutes or so per user and i think it's just again fascinating that this is both, I guess it's like part entertainment, part educational, part community.

16:39What do you think the real glue is that keeps people around for that long? I think you kind of nailed it. I think it's a lot of community and there's a lot of entertainment combined with those things. And so I think it's very much, we see it when we do things like in real life. And so if we'll do an activation at something like New York Comic Con and you see our community live, you see people like addressing each other by their the usernames and meeting in the first time and they feel like they know each other and so it really feels like a nice kind of positive section of the internet today where people are going in and they have this like-minded interest whether it's a pack of pokemon cards or a rare handbag people like love to talk about these products and collect them and and just like be with the community they can learn in from as well and so So a lot of people are just arguing it for different reasons, but I think people are really just finding true community on the platform.

17:32And it's quite special. You kind of have to go and witness it to really understand it. I didn't really put that together until just talking to you right now. But I used to go to baseball card stores as a kid and 40%, maybe 40 to 60 % of the time was looking at baseball cards. And the other 40 to 60 % of the time on any given day was just talking to other people in the shop and talking to the owners and hanging out. So I totally see this as like an interesting kind of virtual third space for people who are interested around a shared kind of commercial good can get together and connect with other like-minded people.

18:08and imagine if you don't if you didn't have like a baseball shop like in your hometown right you can access all this from like the comfort of your couch and you're able to see way crazier product than you'd be able to see at your local shop because you can just go through and there's hundreds of people selling sports cards today right now on the platform uh and you can see the latest releases so part of it is like you get to see this amazing product and this like high-end product that may cost thousands of dollars uh and you're able to like see it at any like moment and And so you can see these super rare cards.

18:38There was this crazy card a couple of years ago called the Triple Logo Man, which is LeBron card that had three NBA Logo Mans from his jersey from all three teams he played for. And there's a huge hunt going after it. And it's a very new story, but I'll get into it because I'm into it. Drake was opening up hundreds of thousands of dollars of cards on his Instagram. Everyone was chasing after this one card. And then eventually, it was opened and found on whatnot. and the people that were there just like had this moment of history of like finding this card, seeing it for the first time. And eventually it was sold for like, I think it was like over$3 million.

19:12And so that's like an amazing way to see like crazy high-end product. And also, you know, I think some of the cool parts of sports cards is like, maybe you want to buy just a pack within, you know, some of these boxes are expensive. Maybe you don't have a couple hundred dollars to buy a whole box and you just want to buy a pack. And then a lot of this is also just like democratizing that a little bit where you can buy, you know, sellers are selling an individual pack of a big box and you're all kind of like part of this box break together, which again plays on this element of like being a part of the community and all being in it like for the same thing.

19:46So looking towards the future, what are you most stoked on? What are you most excited about in this space? Yeah. I mean, I think this is, I think we're just like in the early, early days of, of live shopping. I do think, um, you know, I think last year was like a huge step forward. I think this is probably like the big year that live shopping really does become more mainstream. I think just the amount of different utilities and like use cases that you see live shopping really working for. I'm now, you know, I'm obviously like internal and I'm drinking the Kool-Aid, but I'm now of the opinion that like pick something you can buy online and tell me like it can't be enhanced by live video.

20:20everything from like cars to now we have like fresh seafood being sold like on whatnot where you have like a fisherman showing you how they caught the lot like the lobster and then they are selling you the lobster and overnighting it to your door you have like big brands that are going live and selling beauty products and so i think there's just like a ton of different use cases uh and so i think you'll just see a lot more people getting into it new categories uh new types of sellers like brands haven't really figured it out yet but i think they'll be they'll really be leaning in this year, especially because based on all the inbound that we're getting from them.

20:53And so, I just think this is going to be a year that live shopping becomes a bit more mainstream. We're going to see you selling some Artifact sneakers on one at any time? Honestly, I should. I do. I do at least once a year, but Artifact, which is my little side passion project, has unfortunately kind of died because of what has taken over my life. But every year I tell myself I'm going to get back into it. Got it. Armand, this was amazing. Thank you so much for coming on. We'd love to have you back. A fascinating deep dive into this app and this space. And where can people find out more about Whatnot?

21:26Just download the app or visit our website, whatnot.com. And I truly believe it's one of those things where it doesn't make sense until you're in the app and you're actually engaging with things. And now, five years ago, when I first joined, I would not tell anyone to just download it because it was a very specific thing we were selling. It was very collectibles heavy. Now, this is something for everyone. And so I would just encourage folks to download the app, play around with it. And I think you'll really see kind of like the magic for yourself. Awesome. Thank you so much for coming on. Thanks for having me, Jeff.

21:56Appreciate it. Love talking with Arman. And since our conversation, I can't stop thinking about this idea that these creators who are doing this live shopping and social commerce are really creating these community experiences. I just never thought about it in that way before. I saw this like strictly commercial enterprise, but thinking of it as this community environment, I totally get it. Because I loved going to those stores as a kid.

22:18Armand Wilson:All right, Josh, let's get into it. The trial of the century. So as we all know, but as a recap, so Meta and Google are being sued by someone whose name has not been disclosed. But it is a person, a minor, at least at the time, who claims they have been harmed by an addiction to social media. And so the reason why this is such a big sort of trial, which I think bears repeating, is the fact that there are like, I don't know, a thousand other cases sort of waiting in the wings that are very similar to this. So should the judgment go in favor of the plaintiff, in other words, them saying that, yes, social media is addictive and the sort of platforms knew this and et cetera, and they didn't do anything to sort of stop it, it's going to be what they call sort of a watershed thing and it's going to create precedent.

23:02Armand Wilson:So all these like thousand plus cases waiting in the wings are going to probably going to lean on this and then they're going to probably get judgments in their favor such that the platforms are probably going to be forced to make major changes as it relates to kids. Changes that up until this point they basically are either saying they cannot do or refuse to do. An example would be like right now you're not supposed to be on social media before the age of 13, but it's not the platforms are not actually, you know, liable to to enforce that. They're just sort of like, well, we didn't know. And so the big so Missouri, you know, Adam Missouri testified about a week ago and now sort of infamously said that he doesn't think that social media is addictive.

23:41If anything, it's the similar to sort of watching a Netflix show for, you know, 19 hours at a time.

23:46Armand Wilson:So this week, now Mark Zuckerberg, you know, testified in trial. And a few highlights from that. He said that increasing engagement on Instagram was not a company goal because what the plaintiffs are sort of, I think, arguing is that like they're going to do anything to increase engagement, which includes potentially harming kids. And he's saying that, you know, that's not a company goal, which having worked there, having worked anywhere, I think that we can all agree that's probably not true. Oh, one thing I do want to mention is like a lot of the meta folks entered the courtroom wearing the meta Ray-Ban glasses and the judge was not pleased about that.