As we scan our social media feeds on our phones, we are constantly being served some version of commerce disguised as entertainment – a “what I ordered vs what I got” reel, a creator unboxing a haul, or a get-ready-with-me video. Fashion retail has already been living inside video for years, and now Whatnot’s live shopping app is poised to grab the majority share.
The classic e‑commerce product page (flat images, rigid sizing charts, templated copy) was never a natural home for something as tactile, social and identity‑laden as clothing. It is an interface built for certainty, applied to an industry built on nuance; now live shopping is the market that aims to address this mismatch.
I view this change as a potential infrastructure shift, not just a clever gimmick. This is why live shopping giant Whatnot’s rise matters to Western fashion right now; not simply because “live shopping is growing” (it is), but because it reveals what the next product page, the next returns strategy, and the next “store” might actually look like. As Grant LaFontaine, co‑founder & CEO of Whatnot states, “live shopping is no longer the future of retail. It’s the present.”
Live Shopping: The New Product Page Is A Person
At a Whatnot live shopping briefing I attended in London, Whatnot’s UK General Manager, Daniel Fisher, used an analogy that resonated because it so clearly captured what fashion has been trying to recreate since the first “add to basket” button: the feeling of being known in a store.
“It’s really about bringing the best of an in-store experience directly to your phone. If you were to head to Soho right now, and walk into a boutique… Imagine that boutique owner closing the store for you, and you’re there with 50 of your friends.”
This frames the store as a relationship, rather than just a square footage metric. This is the part many brands misunderstand when they test livestream shopping like it is a seasonal campaign format. They treat it as a channel, but live shopping acts more like a service layer: it collapses the distance between discovery, education and transaction.
For fashion, this is a big deal because the most expensive problems in the category (anxiety around fit, authenticity, trust, styling confidence) are all communication problems, rather than inventory problems.
A good host is effectively a human “UX layer”: answering questions in real time, showing fabric movement, narrating fit, giving context, building social proof in public. This transforms the live chat from just a comment section into the new fitting room.
Sellers getting this format right does not just lead to more sales, it changes what “conversion” even means. It becomes less like clicking “buy now” and more like joining a habit.
“Live shopping is a combination of commerce and entertainment, with buyers tuning in for over two million hours weekly and an average Whatnot user spending over 95 minutes a day watching live shopping [Netflix’s average user time is 120 minutes a day].” Fisher went on to say that, “the key to this entertainment factor lies in leveraging the tools available – be it auctions, flash sales or ‘buy it now’s, combined with authenticity (knowing about your product and audience) and consistency. We see sellers who go live daily make on average 166 times more in revenue than sellers who go live once a month.”
Whatnot’s own report positions live commerce as becoming mainstream fast, with Whatnot holding close to 60% market share across North America and Europe, and reporting $8B in live sales GMV in 2025. These are huge numbers, but the sharper fashion implication is that the winner is not just the brand that “does a live,” but the brand (or seller) that builds a repeatable show.
As Fisher described, “consistency is very important. The more you go live, the more success you will see. Daily sellers now average £30,000 a month in sales in the UK and surveyed sellers told us that live selling accounts for two thirds of their total business sales.”
What Live Shopping Means For Fashion Returns
As has been well reported, fashion has a returns problem that it rarely treats like the strategic crisis it is. Returns are not just margin leakage; they can entail reverse logistics, fraud risk, waste, and operational drag, all at enormous scale. In the U.S. alone, the National Retail Federation and Happy Returns estimate total retail returns could hit $890 billion in 2024, with 16.9% of annual sales returned.
Live shopping potentially puts a new spin on this: in the Whatnot ecosystem, returns and end‑of‑line stock do not just get written down, they get re‑contextualised. At the briefing announcing Whatnot’s 2026 State of Live Selling Report, Mike and Annabel Winter of fashion channel Weardeadstock described working directly with brands to take returns and end‑of‑line stock and auctioning items with low starting prices, turning reverse logistics into a format the audience actually wants to watch. This turns live shopping from “QVC for Gen Z” to something more operationally interesting for fashion: returns become programming.
In a traditional brand model, returned inventory is often hidden in warehouses, offloaded through opaque channels, or dumped into off‑price flows that train consumers to wait for discounts. In live shopping, that same inventory can become a time‑boxed event (“returns rail”, “warehouse clearout”, “reverse drop”) or a transparent story (“here’s why this is a return, here’s what’s imperfect, here’s why it’s still great”).
Although this does not solve overproduction, it turns one of fashion’s most painful cost centres into a relationship moment, all while clearing inventory fast. It also hints at a future where the best live operators do not just sell, but can stabilise the messy middle of fashion’s supply chain.
“The biggest concern from brands was product oversaturation,” Winter told me. “Brands didn’t want products appearing across multiple marketplaces at once, which can dilute perceived value. We address this by offering a controlled, channel-exclusive environment. When items are sold on Whatnot, brands can move stock directly to engaged customers very quickly – often getting hundreds of pieces into real wardrobes within days, not months.”
Winter adds, “that speed and visibility is particularly valuable for smaller or emerging brands. Instead of sitting, their products are worn, shared, and seen almost immediately, helping to build awareness and social proof organically.”
Why China Made Live Shopping Infrastructure
If you want to understand where live shopping goes when it becomes “normal,” you need look no further than China.
Renowned entrepreneur Gary Vaynerchuk (also a seller on Whatnot) writes in the foreword for their report that “China has been the global proof point for years. Livestream commerce there surpassed $700B+ in GMV (gross merchandise value) last year, and top creators sell millions in a single night. In the U.S., we’re now at the same cultural and technological inflection point China hit a decade ago. Community-driven platforms are mainstream, consumers crave authenticity more than polished perfection.”
McKinsey famously pointed to Alibaba’s Singles’ Day presales on Taobao Live, where the first 30 minutes generated $7.5 billion in total transaction value; an almost absurd demonstration of what happens when entertainment, retail and logistics are fused. More importantly, McKinsey’s analysis suggested that, if China is a guide, sales initiated through live commerce could account for 10% to 20% of all e‑commerce by 2026.
China has now shifted live shopping from a feature to an entire layer; live commerce has matured into an ecosystem with specialised roles (hosts, moderators, operators), supply chains built for speed, and platforms designed to convert attention into purchase without friction.
Whatnot’s Live Shopping Treats Trust As The Format
This is where Whatnot deserves more credit than it sometimes gets in surface-level coverage. Yes, the numbers are astonishing: the Whatnot report positions the live shopping market at an estimated $22B across North America and Europe, more than doubling and projected to double again, with Whatnot leading market share.
But the more telling signal is behavioural: Whatnot is training consumers to treat shopping as something you attend, not something you click.
At the UK briefing, seller stories described hours‑long streams, intense community rituals, and “event retail” energy, right down to viewers booking time off work to watch Black Friday streams.
This sounds like entertainment, which it is. But it is also a trust mechanism: the more time you spend with a host, the less “anonymous internet risk” you feel. You are not buying from a page; you are buying from a person with receipts, reputation, and a live audience watching.
For fashion, where trust is both the problem and the moat, this matters hugely. The report also notes that Women’s Fashion is among Whatnot’s fastest-growing lifestyle categories year-on-year (UK buyers watch over 500,000 hours of women’s fashion shows on Whatnot each month). This signals that live is not just staying in collectibles, but is moving into the messy, subjective categories where taste and fit dominate.
The Way Ahead For Fashion Brands
Live shopping is not just marketing; it is an operating model that fuses merchandising, media, community, logistics and also the future of search. It rewards items with narrative weight: provenance, scarcity, visible quality, and the kind of styling transformation that would be hard to communicate on a static page. This is why resale, deadstock and “drop” culture translate so naturally; those products arrive pre-loaded with context, and context is the thing a good host can amplify in real time.
Live also switches returns from being a cost centre, where the goal is to make them disappear into the warehouse and off-price channels with as little brand damage as possible, into a front-of-house format; inventory you can explain, show, measure, and move transparently. The most obvious operational benefit of this is velocity, but the more strategic benefit is subtler; you can rebuild trust by making condition, fit and value visible in public, rather than leaving customers to gamble alone.
And crucially, none of this works without the human layer. The host is more than the “talent,” they are the interface. They replace the product page, the fitting room, and the customer service in one fell swoop. Without the key benefits of this role (product knowledge, taste, community management), live streams become more like a stiff advert, and the audience will treat it like one.
Live Shopping Is Becoming A “Third Place” Again
For years, fashion has been trying to win on convenience: one-click checkout, next-day delivery, and endless choice. But culture keeps drifting back toward something more familiar: shopping as social life.
Live shopping is about more than just buying, it is about being there when it happens. In a fragmented attention economy, where Deloitte notes social platforms and creator-led video are becoming a new centre of gravity for entertainment, commerce formats that feel like entertainment will keep pulling budget, time and cultural “heat” away from static retail experiences.
Could this be seen as the return of the digital high street? Not the high street as real estate, but as a habit: familiar faces, community rituals, and the feeling that taste is being made live, in public, with other people watching.
China has proved this at scale and this is what Whatnot is building in a Western context: live shopping as an infrastructure layer for trust, community and commerce…one person, one show, and one audience at a time.
