Whatnot: The Bad
Last week I covered the virtues of the live-streaming, card-selling platform. Now, the downside to whatnot.
The format excels at the art of time suckage. It is social media, emphasis on “social”. Building an audience for your livestream is the only way to drive sales and that means spending hours and hours glad-handing on other streams. I don’t know about you, but I don’t have the time for that (nor would my wife sit by while I tried, but that is another story).
Seller unprofessionalism is the norm and it can be frustrating as hell because they control the tempo and content of the stream. A few sellers drink on air to the point where they become semi-coherent, foul-mouthed messes by the end of their shows. Many of the sellers are disorganized or run items for sale at an annoyingly slow pace. I watched one guy spend ten minutes, shuffling and showing cards but never actually selling a thing. He kept saying "I have these" and people kept saying "run them" but he just...didn't. Just shuffle, shuffle, shuffle. Some of the sharper tools in the shed also spend 10 minutes on finding $1 card while multiple people are asking for much more expensive stuff. Or someone asks for a specific card, like a 1986 Topps Traded Bo Jackson, and they spend five minutes shuffling and showing Jackson cards that the buyer didn't request instead of just saying "nope, don't have it" and moving on. They also falsely advertise their show content trying to lure watchers. I saw one stream with a 1971 Pete Maravich marking his vintage basketball show and when I went on there asking for vintage basketball he said "I'll be selling those in November" as he offered this year's shiny crap.
The app is still in its early stages. Glitches and outages from time to time. Post Malone did some sort of show there and crashed the site. There is no neat index of items or viable search engine, so the only way to get stuff is to sit there endlessly waiting for the seller to dredge up something worthwhile. Their search feature returns gibberish unless you adhere to some very tricky search parameters. The mobile and web versions do not have corresponding features. Using the site from a laptop is very different than on a phone. Some basic features work on one but not the other.
The app is very much geared to phone users, to the point where you must create listings for buy it now sales via your phone. It is a limited, clunky, and cumbersome methodology that is indicative of the company’s focus on young collectors who use their phones for everything. I hope they clue into the fact that collectors in their 40s-50s have the most disposable income and do not use their phones the same way. For us, the platform and format are decidedly unwelcoming. I know I gave up on listing cards there when I realized I would have to paw at my iPhone for hours to create listings rather than quickly punching them in on my Mac.
The short attention span of the participants is another generational problem. With hundreds of baseball card streams at any given time, if you run a few items that no one wants in a row, the mostly Millennial and Gen Z audience just melts away. It can kill your sales if there is no one on the stream to compete in the auctions. That never happens on eBay.
To pacify the inattentive man-boys who comprise most of the audience, sellers are encouraged to do giveaways. Posting a freebie causes the algorithm to boost the seller’s spot on the list of streams, and that is important because with a few thousand streams going each day, placement on the list of listings is critical. Placement = looks = watchers = customers. In my view, though, whether you offer free crap is a terrible basis for ranking sellers because it makes it hard to gauge how many serious buyers are in a stream at any time versus how many are pure freeloaders. Many of the ‘buyers’ are only waiting on freebies. These twerps will sit there for forty minutes waiting for a $2 card to be raffled, buying nothing, and repeatedly posting ‘givvey?’ in the stream. It is not unusual to see a stream lose 75% of its watchers after a ‘givvey’ raffle ends. There are even private chat boards and bots dedicated to tracking freebies on the platform. Oh, and each ‘givvey’ costs the seller $4 in postage. It is an entirely childish, unbusinesslike system.
Since no one is going to sit through hours of people running cards they don’t want at a glacial pace unless there is something to do, the chat that runs alongside the auctions themselves becomes important. The chat poses a hazard for sellers in two ways. First, the crowd can take control of the livestream and before you know it, the cards being offered are lost in the party chat. Second, the dealer can spend all his time responding to the chat and chasing requested items he wasn’t ready to sell, which makes a mess of the stream. My experience is that most people who ask for rare or expensive cards have no intention of buying them for a fair price, they just want to see if they can steal a deal. They waste your time and drive off the audience who doesn’t want to sit around while you try to find the requested card. I had some problems with my first stream because I fell into that trap. I forgot the most important maxim of working a crowd that I learned as a stand-up comedian: never give the audience the mic.
Trolls exist on whatnot, and they have equal access to the comment stream, so they can disrupt your livestream in progress, which can cost you audience share and money. You can block the trolls, but it still makes it a PITA.
There is also a lot of lying, cheating and gambling on the site. Lying may be a bit harsh. Mostly it is negligent misrepresentation of facts; many sellers really have no idea what they are doing and haven’t got a clue as to cards made more than a few years ago, so there is a ton of misinformation thrown around. Sometimes it is laughable, but a lot of the time the hapless sellers cost clueless buyers real money by spouting total crap, like claiming that Chicago players’ cards in T206 are short prints. There are some true scammers on the site who regularly misrepresent the facts around specific cards.
Cheating is a big issue, one that is worst in the prewar card area. Most of the cards sell raw, which makes the platform a great place to dump doctored vintage cards. The sad part is that so many of the buyers are inexperienced and younger and simply do not have the chops to spot an altered card. There is at least one notorious seller of trimmed cards who uses whatnot as an outlet for his trash. Shill bidding also is rampant. One of the biggest sellers of vintage cards on the site blatantly shilled his own auctions through a related account and was suspended…for a day (insert roll-eyes emoji). Yay, justice…
The gambling is ridiculous and brazen. There are dozens of games of chance active at any given time. There are guidelines in the whatnot rules designed to thread the needle of legality, but some of the streams are more casino than card show. Some even use gambling devices in their streams. Things that had been outlawed at card show years ago, like spinning wheels and dice games, are all over the platform.
The most troublesome thing I see is that bidding is not anonymous. Having open-identity bidding encourages friends of the seller to jack up prices on their friends’ streams. I’ve seen this. It also is apparent that people tend not to bid against their friends publicly, which depresses activity and selling prices. As a seller you must start items a lot higher than you would on eBay because in any given group several of them may be unwilling to competitively bid. The problem is especially acute with mainstream cards where there isn't real FOMO at work.
In my view, the platform owners must decide whether they are a social media site or a commerce site. If the latter, they need to institute some structural changes, principal among them the institution of blind bidding and making the phone and computer experiences more consistent. As I said last week, the platform has promise and I hope it lasts because something needs to stick a burr under eBay’s saddle.
Next week I am off for some family stuff but back the week after that with new analyses, screeds and complaints.