ContextLogic, Inc. is the company behind the vast but unusual online marketplace, Wish. Wish shot into the public consciousness in the late 2010s as the home of incredibly cheap consumer goods: items that typically retail for hundreds in the US are available on Wish, manufactured and shipped directly from China, for laughably small sums – smartphones for $30, jumpers for $2, imitation Apple Watches for $9. Searches for ‘is Wish legit’ and variants became common as shoppers delighted, and sometimes despaired, in their low-cost and often low-quality offerings.

Wish originated in the work of Piotr Szulczewski, a Polish-born former Google engineer who spent six months in 2009 writing an algorithm to predict Internet users’ interests based on their search history, called ContextLogic. In 2011, Szulczewski turned down a $20 million offer from Facebook to integrate ContextLogic into their ads platform, instead developing the code further with co-founder Danny Zhang. This turned out to be a fortuitous decision; with $2.5 billion in 2020 revenue and 107 million average monthly users, Wish now operates in 100 countries around the globe.

Navigating Wish reveals a cluttered, eclectic feed of bizarre, and always cheap, items. Wish also applies discounts in a gamified ‘wheel of fortune’ randomly applied to certain items in an effort to enliven the experience of online shopping. The novelty of this, attested to by Wish’s number one App Store position in 2018 and vast user base, sometimes masks problems with orders. Consistent consumer complaints about slow delivery times and shoddy product quality resulted in the YouTube phenomenon of ‘Wish Unboxings’, where users record opening their cheap packages to discover their unusable or poorly made contents. To combat this, Wish culls around 8 million fraudulent or low-quality listings per week.

Despite these concerns, Wish has found a loyal userbase among Americans on low incomes or without access to credit, turning Wish into the third-largest online marketplace in the US in 2019. Wish differentiates itself from other online marketplaces in focusing specifically on Chinese merchants, with favorable shipping terms and advertising targeted on this market. These suppliers are connected to low-cost shoppers in the US and elsewhere whom they were previously unable to reach.

Wish’s 2020 NASDAQ IPO at $24 per share traded immediately down to $22.75. Since then investors have driven the place lower as Wish’s losses have deepened, even as revenue has grown considerably. Wish’s major institutional shareholders include the quantitative trading firm Susquehanna Financial Group, and family offices, with Vanguard as the third-largest shareholder. Szulczewski owns about 18% of the company and is the single largest shareholder.