Whatnot Expands Non-Live Shopping Options With Auctions & Video Listings
Live selling platform Whatnot is expanding its non-live shopping options with Auctions and Video listings offering 24/7 convenience in addition to the livestream excitement the site is known for.
The Whatnot product team revealed these new features in a recent company blog post.
Live shows are the beating heart of Whatnot – driving connection and creating a fun, personalized shopping experience for buyers. Live selling means you can respond to buyer interests in real-time (got any size 12s?!) negotiate offers, and experience the excitement from chat when you drop a prized Lego fig, break a huge card, or put an especially cool piece up for sale. Today, buyers are watching two million hours of live shows every week on Whatnot. That’s the equivalent of watching 5.5 million episodes of Pokémon, or over 1.3 million football matches!
While live shows will always be the core of Whatnot, marketplace listings have become an important complement to your business, driving discovery of your products and shows when you’re not live, and enabling you to feel confident running high-priced items without worrying if the right buyers showed up to that particular show.
Today, we’re excited to introduce two new features that integrate some of the best parts of live shopping with the convenience of asynchronous listings on the marketplace: Auctions and Video Listings.
Auctions
Whatnot says their new Auctions feature "combines the excitement of live auctions with the benefit of building an audience around an item over a full week."
Auctions allow sellers to run a product auction for a longer duration outside of a live show and seller can also pin it within a live show to drive engagement and bids or share the hype of its final moments.
Whatnot says the new option improves discoverability and is a great way to sell higher-value items. They're also revamping how buyers can track their bids, purchases, and offers activity as part of this update.
Auctions are now live in select categories like Sports Cards, with other categories coming soon. Sellers who are interested in using the new auction functionality can sign up for the waitlist here.
Video Listings
Video Listings are now in Beta, allowing sellers to bring some of the energy from their live shows to their – even when they're not going live.
This feature provides the option to add a short video preview to regular listings to draw in buyers and sparks interest in your products.
To create a video listing, just access the listings creation flow as you normally would (i.e., tap “+” button on the bottom home navigation, and then “List an Item”).
Whatnot has provided a full How To tutorial for adding videos to listings in the beta experience.
The product team at Whatnot has been busy with other updates and improvements as well, like a Seller API, improved discovery, new ways to refer new sellers and tools to help new sellers get comfortable going live.
Liz Morton
What do you think of Whatnot's ongoing product improvements? Let us know in the comments below!
