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Comment by whoisjuan | Hacker News Reader

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 exposed to the winds of international trade policy.

This is just a fancy wrapper on top of AliExpress which is honestly superior when it comes to buy crap. In AliExpress you get way more insight into what you're buying and its quality, shipping times, shipping rates, etc. In Wish you don't and you will most likely get the most low tier quality product.

I hope that an IPO can bring more discipline into their business and help them move to a more sustainable and innovative model.

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> low customer expectations

Nope. They run ads with outrageous lies and some people fall for them.

How is this different from Amazon or Wal Mart -> 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 exposed to the winds of international trade policy.

> 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 ...

Dropbox and AirBnB had the added value of being simpler use than whatever they replaced.

Wish does not have that. The shopping experience on Aliexpress is similar if not better and it is backed by Alibaba so it will only grow. Wish capitalizes on low customer expectations and dirt cheap prices. There is nothing in that business model that can't be easily copied by another Chinese company.

Wish has their own warehousing and inventorying as well though. It’s not a pure AliExpress wrapper. Don’t get me wrong though, I’m not a fan of Wish.

Aliexpress looks and feels similar to Wish though.

Not like comparing s3 to dropbox

The power of a brand name though. Wish is memorable.

Wish is number 6 on Shopping App Chart and Aliexpress is at 30 or so. It’s more popular but Aliexpress barely does any marketing in the US AFAIK

Anecdotally, I've always used my laptop when shopping on AliExpress, but always used my phone for Wish.

Wish also has a huge ad spend on Facebook and Instagram driving app downloads. I see at least 10x more ads for Wish than AliExpress.

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.

Interesting, wouldn’t AliExpress be building up big potential sales tax liabilities with US states?

I know I'm late to this, but it turns out they do collect US sales tax. Not sure about the others like taobao or dhgate, etc.

Yeah, might be okay for small overseas businesses to ignore economic nexus of US states, but I am sure some states will eventually go to great lengths to get their hands on big liabilities built up by big companies.

Care to fill out those ellipsis? There's plenty value-add on top of S1 for drobox. And what's AirBnB a wrapper for? "the market"?

I don't get why you picked AirBnB for this analogy -- AirBnB invented a whole new industry, they aren't just a layer on top of existing tools. Dropbox I think fits, so does Snowflake.

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