January 01, 2024

The rise and fall of Zulily: What happened to the Seattle e-commerce giant?

What was Zulily?

Zulily was an online retailer providing daily deals on various products.

The site offered heavily discounted invite only flash sales to its customers and gained huge popularity and rave reviews in its first operational months.

Most products were initially from little-known brands and included prenatal care products, baby gear, travel accessories, bedding and bath, children's clothing, toys, DVDs, and educational materials.

Why did Zulily fail and shut down?

The main culprit for the downfall of the popularity of Zulily is poor marketing and user-attention strategies, compounded by significant financial issues that ultimately led to its liquidation to satisfy creditors.

Most notably, in order to access the search engine and databases of Zulily’s shopping items, the platform required new visitors to give their email addresses prior to even seeing what the online store had to offer.

This marketing trick met with a lot of criticism because it violated some basic marketing principles. Zulily initially achieved record success with the number of new subscribers who registered on the site, but the Zulily team soon noticed that sales began rapidly to decline.

People gave their mail only to peek at the site and registered users couldn’t necessarily be considered loyal or even willing customers.

Zulily's inadequate marketing strategy and front-page email requests discouraged thousands of potential new customers to sign up, while their existing users often bought only once or anyway not enough to sustain the financial stability of the company.

Users also stated that they felt overwhelmed by the number of merchandise and flash sales invitations the e-shop offered so the company complied by diminishing them, and a decrease in revenue also followed.

Moreover, although Zulily sometimes offered brand names for ridiculously small prices, there would often be longer than expected delivery times to customers which also earned them poor reviews.

In addition to these factors, Zulily's ultimate closure was precipitated by financial issues. The company began liquidating its assets to satisfy creditors, indicating a critical need to address its debts. This led to the shutting down of several facilities and the loss of hundreds of jobs across multiple states. The financial distress became too overwhelming to continue operations, resulting in the shutdown of the business.

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As the e-commerce landscape continues to evolve, we've witnessed the closure of several marketplaces, leaving consumers and sellers seeking reliable alternatives. In this blog post, we'll explore the shifting tides of online retail, the closure of other marketplaces, and why our platform stands as a robust and trustworthy choice in the ever-changing world of digital commerce.

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