San Francisco-based mobile shopping app Wish has kicked off a campaign to dramatically increase the number of merchants on its platform from countries other than China. It has hired people in Australia, Brazil and Europe to make contact with local brands, slashed its commission rate to attract new sign-ups and promised significant exposure through its internal advertising machine.  The move comes less than a year after Wish went public on the NASDAQ after racking up US$1.75 billion in sales in the first nine months of 2020, a 32 per cent increase on the prior corresponding period, thanks to the impact of Covid-19. “This company grew like crazy during 2020 like every other online pureplay,” Shira Levine, Wish’s global businesses development representative for Australia and New Zealand, told Inside Retail. While Wish reported declining revenue and widening losses in the quarter ended June 30 compared to the previous quarter, many analysts remain optimistic about the company’s long-term growth prospects, especially as it shifts its product mix away from cheap products out of China towards branded merchandise from sellers around the world. The counterfeit problem“I think [Wish] decided that it was time to grow up a little bit,”  Levine said about the company’s new focus. “They realised that most of the supply side was China-based, and that came with some problems.”  The app had developed a reputation for selling counterfeit products and exceedingly slow delivery times, which was hurting its ability to compete in a maturing e-commerce market. The campaign to sign up new sellers outside of China is a direct effort to change consumers’  perceptions of Wish. “Consumers are really sophisticated these days, and they know what’s what,” Levine said. “We want to give them the highest quality assurance that we can and focusing on branded merchandise is a great way to do that. It’s a shorthand for trust.” To entice brands to join the platform, Levine is emphasising Wish’s low rates. Unlike other popular online marketplaces, such as Amazon, eBay and Catch, Wish doesn’t charge a subscription or fixed price listing fee for selling on its platform; it only charges a commission rate of between 5 and 25 per cent depending on the product category. As a sign-up bonus, sellers can lock in a 5 per cent commission rate for their first three months. Levine said new sellers offering branded merchandise will also benefit from significant exposure through the app’s internal advertising machine. Some of the branded products currently sold on Wish include Kate Spade, Puma, Samsung, Sunbeam and Lenovo. Gadgets, fashion, hobbies and home decor are among the top-selling product categories globally, with hobbies, home decor and beauty among the fastest growing categories in Australia and New Zealand. Focus on discoveryFounded by Peter Szulczewski in 2010, Wish is a mobile-first marketplace with 107 million monthly active users in over 100 countries, 500,00 registered merchants and 150 million items available for sale.  Over 90 per cent of orders are placed through its mobile app, and 70 per cent of transactions take place without a search query, meaning they originate from the user’s personalised feed. “It’s a discovery-based algorithm,” Levin explained. “If you come from a social ad or a Google ad, it knows something about you demographically and serves you what it thinks you might like. And then whenever you tap on [products], it continues to fill your feed like Instagram with content that you might like.”The app uses gamification to keep shoppers engaged, offering rewards for logging into the app day after day and ‘spin-to-win’ wheels to receive a percentage or dollar amount off of their order. Levine said Wish is also ‘pro merchant’, meaning if it advertises a blanket 50 per cent discount on a particular day, it absorbs the cost, rather than passing it onto the merchant.“In marketplaces, supply and demand is critical, you’ve always got to think of both sides,” she said.