Wanelo Leading Social Commerce

Wanelo is becoming more and more popular among social shoppers these days. The name stands for "wanting, needing, loving". It is a shopping platform that have attracted over 11 million users to come expressly to shop. It is tackling the much-talked-about but elusive phenomenon known as social commerce — and seeing some impressive gains.

The shopping platform has become a go-to digital mall that has 350,000 digital stores with 20 million products and every item uploaded to the platform contains a direct path to purchase.

Founder and CEO Deena Varshavskaya said that Wanelo was born out of necessity. Leading social media platforms for fashion followers such as Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and Instagram were not transforming the commerce experience as expected. They failed to address the particular set of problems that an online shopping venue has to solve.

If a user stumbled upon a desired item on Pinterest, for example, it’s hard to find if the product is in stock, if the store has it in their size and if it’s on sale. Wanelo aims to solve these problems the existing social platforms face. The website was founded in 2011, and was self-funded for two years before getting outside capital. So far, Wanelo has raised over $14 million from many investors.

The CEO gave some statistics about the website: user is 90 percent female, 90 percent U.S.-based and 90 percent on mobile. Fifty percent of users are between the ages of 18 and 25 and they come to Wanelo to do just one thing: shop.

She stressed the need for the “world’s digital mall curated by people” as she outlined the decline of the physical shopping mall. In the Nineties, consumers visited malls about two times a month for about four hours at a time, driving $1 trillion in sales. Today, 15 percent of malls are expected to shut down over the next decade, she said.

“As malls close, the consumer is disappearing. Malls are competing with an entire new entity,” Varshavskaya said, adding that her shopper is one who spends six hours online, three hours on a mobile device and 70 minutes on social networks per day. She noted that 87 percent of Millennials never leave their phones and can spend up to three hours on social networks every day. One third of them don’t frequent malls, 84 percent hate advertising and 50 percent shop online nearly every day for at least an hour.

That is perhaps why retailers such as Nordstrom, Urban Outfitters and Sephora are all active on the platform. In June, Nordstrom rolled out Wanelo wall displays in 107 of its doors, featuring styles it already carries that are rated most popular by Wanelo’s users. The retailer gained one million Wanelo followers in just five months and now has 1.4 million.

According to Varshavskaya, Urban Outfitters’ Wanelo shoppers convert at a rate four times greater than any other social network (the store has implemented a Wanelo button alongside other social media action buttons on product pages), and Sephora called the platform its “fastest-growing social platform.” Farfetch said Wanelo converts five times greater than Pinterest.