Whatnot Has Americans Hooked on Livestream Shopping
Since discovering the liveshopping app Whatnot in September, Virginia Acosta has signed on multiple times a week, looking for deals on beauty products. She’ll open her phone and find herself on a channel where a host holds up, say, a bottle of perfume, prompting the audience to bid. The speed of these auctions, which are sometimes completed in just a few seconds of frenetic bidding, add a sense of urgency that Acosta finds irresistible.
In some cases, Acosta comes away with a great deal; in others, she spends far more than she intended to. But the net result of all the app-fueled shopping has been piles of unneeded merchandise crowding her bathroom and spilling out of the cabinets of her home in Florida. “I have more makeup now than I could ever use in a lifetime. And hair products. And every fragrance I could ever want,” says Acosta, 59, who says she regrets the thousands of dollars she’s spent. She describes the appeal as this one-two punch: “You get the dopamine of winning this very fast auction, and you get the dopamine hit of buying something at a very low price.”
While still a novelty in the US, livestream shopping has been deeply entrenched in Asia for years. In China, sales via livestream apps accounted for roughly 60% of the e-commerce market in 2024, compared with just 5% in the US, according to the investment management firm ARK Invest. Whatnot, where sellers operating from the crammed aisles of warehouses or makeshift studios in their bedrooms hawk everything from sports cards to fresh seafood, is one of the first such apps to gain traction in the US. As of April it was the second-most-downloaded shopping app in Apple’s App Store in the US, above e-commerce giants including Amazon.com and eBay.
Whatnot Inc., the Los Angeles-based startup behind the app, has raised almost $1 billion in capital from prominent investors such as Sequoia Capital, Andreessen Horowitz and Alphabet Inc.’s CapitalG, which have been drawn to an experience that combines social media with online shopping. Its most recent funding round in October pegged its value at $11.5 billion. According to Sensor Tower, a market research firm, the average Whatnot user spent 46 minutes on the app in the first quarter of 2026, compared with 83 minutes for the average YouTube user.
Sellers on Whatnot create more than 5 million listings a day. Last year the company facilitated about $8 billion in sales, up from $3 billion the year before, taking an 8% cut of each transaction. (It also makes money by selling services to sellers looking to promote themselves on the platform and fulfill orders.) Grant LaFontaine, one of Whatnot’s founders, says he expects transaction volume to double year-over-year in 2026.
Live auctions weren’t part of Whatnot when LaFontaine, 37, and Logan Head, 36, released the app in 2019. LaFontaine, who started selling Pokémon cards online when he was about 10 years old, wanted to create an online marketplace dedicated to Funko Pops, a popular type of collectible figurine. “I bought and resold things online and always collected stuff, and when we started Whatnot we just thought that experience hadn’t changed much,” says LaFontaine. “A lot of the reason that you collect things is to interact with other people, and so we just thought there was something around social commerce.”
The following year the co-founders were swiping through livestreams on Instagram. They noticed that each time a streamer wanted to sell something, they’d negotiate a price in the comments and then move over to Venmo to facilitate the payment. Seeing an opportunity to streamline that process, Whatnot spent six weeks reworking the app to include live auctions. After the app’s first livestream, in which LaFontaine sold thousands of dollars’ worth of Funko Pops in a few hours, the co-founders pivoted to make live auctions the focus of the company.
Sellers immediately grasped the potential. Amanda Anderson, a stay-at-home mom in Idaho, holds one auction a week, where she sells clothing she buys at a large discount through lost freight and overstock sales. The live format, she says, helps her bond with her customers over repeated streams. “You start to get to know people that come to your shows all the time. You know what they like, you know what sizes they wear, and I think that’s fun because you almost feel like a personal shopper,” she says. “I have people that have come to every single show of mine for a year.” She says she made $75,000 from the platform last year.
Kim Hermes, who’d been selling beauty products on Poshmark, another e-commerce platform, says her sales tripled in three months when she moved to Whatnot. She was soon doing enough volume that she hired a full-time employee to pack orders from her operation in her home spanning a garage full of pallets, a packing room and a selling room.
Customers also highlight the app’s effectiveness at driving spending, though they don’t always see that as a positive thing. In the eyes of its critics, the rapid-fire dynamics of the auctions, the social feel of the app and the ease of transactions all encourage unhealthy behavior. Ari Lightman, a professor of digital media and marketing at Carnegie Mellon University, says Whatnot raises similar questions about habit-forming design that have long dogged social media companies. “It is so worrisome that it’s so easy,” he says. “It’s so social.”
The pace of Whatnot’s auctions can be hard to keep up with. Users say prices can change so quickly that they sometimes commit to paying more than they intended, as other bids send prices surging. While using the app, people bid and pay with a single swipe, which can also lead to mistaken transactions, according to Acosta and other users. Merchants do sometimes cancel such sales and refund users—as one seller did when Acosta accidentally bought a bottle of Burberry Her perfume for more than $800 in a rapidly escalating auction late last year—but the app’s terms of service don’t mandate that they offer such cancellations. A company spokesperson said in a statement that accidental purchases are not a widespread issue.
In interviews with Bloomberg Businessweek, both buyers and sellers say they’ve seen Whatnot lower its barriers for new merchants as it’s grown rapidly. Early sellers remember having to prove an existing presence on other retail platforms or fill out paperwork articulating brand values. “Whatnot used to have a very rigid application process. You had to apply and show pictures of your inventory,” says Hermes. “Today they just accept everybody.”
This practice has raised concerns about the sellers on the platform and the quality of the products they’re selling. In one high-profile case last fall, Adeel Shams, who runs the specialty sneaker trader CoolKicks, was arrested in the middle of a livestream by the Los Angeles Police Department. The LAPD said it had recovered $500,000 worth of merchandise that had been stolen from a train, including more than 2,100 pairs of Nikes, in a raid on the warehouse from which Shams was livestreaming.
CoolKicks returned to the app within months. Shams, who is facing felony charges for receiving stolen property, has denied wrongdoing and didn’t respond to requests for comment.
A spokesperson for Whatnot declined to comment on the case. Whatnot’s spokesperson disputed the idea that its standards had declined, saying each seller on the platform completes an ID verification before going live. Whatnot, which doubled the size of its trust and safety team last year, requires additional applications in certain categories, and bans tens of thousands of accounts each week. “Whatnot’s growth has bolstered our ability to manage quality. More buyers generate more reviews, reports, and other signals we use to improve our detection and enforcement systems,” the spokesperson said in an emailed comment. “The data tells us that quality on Whatnot has kept pace with growth.”
LaFontaine also says the company is responsive to customers’ concerns about the app encouraging compulsive behavior. “You want to make sure people are spending wisely,” he says. Whatnot gives users access to account controls, including a dashboard that monitors time and money spent as well as self-imposed spending limits.
Appropriately for an app whose origins come from the trade in collectibles, Whatnot boasts sports card and trading card game categories that together triple the next-most-popular category when measured by viewership. The demand for sports cards on Whatnot is driven in part by a type of auction known as breaks. In breaks, sellers might record themselves opening a pack of baseball cards after selling off, say, the rights to all the cards featuring players from the Los Angeles Dodgers. (If there aren’t any Dodgers in the pack, the seller keeps the money, and the buyer receives a “consolation” card.)
Breaks also happen on other platforms, but Whatnot has faced criticism—and legal action—for hosting sales that incorporate the element of chance. Paul Lesko, a plaintiffs’ lawyer who calls himself the Hobby Litigator online, has filed more than a dozen arbitration complaints against Whatnot, alleging that these events are illegal lotteries. In his filings he’s written that the company “operates an unregulated online casino where it exploits its customer base by encouraging compulsive spending,” adding that the app does so “without providing the safeguards required of regulated gambling operations.” Lesko says some of his clients have individually spent millions of dollars on Whatnot.
The company has rejected the characterization in the complaint, insisting that gambling isn’t allowed on the platform. It also says that only 4% of sellers host breaks.
Joseph Herzog, a 40-year-old administrative assistant who collects sports cards, says his Whatnot break habit sunk him $50,000 into debt. There have been a few times he’s landed a good card. “All those other times you’re basically throwing money away,” says Herzog, who’s not involved in the arbitration claims against Whatnot. He says he had no history of compulsive behavior or gambling addiction, but is now in therapy to help him deal with his overspending. Even still, he logs back in from time to time.