Product Spotlight: New Tools to Capture Buyer Demand
Buyers around the world spend an average of 95 minutes a day on Whatnot. That isn’t a coincidence. Buyers stick around for great service, real-time answers, and the ability to evaluate items live from sellers like you who bring real expertise to your categories.
You see the impact in your own shows. When buyers feel confident in what they’re buying, they stay longer, bidding picks up, shows run more smoothly, and they return for future shows.
But that momentum doesn’t only start when you go live. It’s shaped by how buyers discover you, how your inventory shows up across the marketplace, and how interest builds before a show even begins. The opportunity is recognizing buyer demand and having the right tools to lean into it. That’s where we come in.
This month’s updates are designed to help you turn live moments into long-term growth. Here’s what’s new and how to use it in your next show.
Get discovered faster: new subcategories
We’ve added new subcategories to help you list your inventory more accurately and reach more focused buyer communities.
This includes:
Food & Drink: Coffee & Tea
Fashion: Sunglasses & Eyewear, Men's Shoes
Electronics: Laptops, Phones & Tablets
Sports & Outdoors: Cycling, Horse Tack
Toys & Hobbies: Baby & Kids Toys, Littlest Pet Shop
Think of subcategories like the labeled shelves within a store. Instead of sending buyers to the general baking aisle, you are pointing them straight to flour. Buyers are searching with more intent, and demand in these focused areas is growing quickly.
When categories are clear, buyers find what they want faster and brands reach the right audience without competing in overly broad spaces. The result is more relevant traffic, stronger engagement, and easier growth. We see this clearly in the data: new category launches grew more than 4x last year.
How to use it: List into the most specific category you can. You will show up in front of buyers who are already interested, and discovery works harder for you.
Make interest count: improved discovery with brands
Clear, accurate listings help us identify what’s being sold in a show, making it easier to tag shows correctly and improve discovery for buyers.
Brand information plays an important role in that. Until now, brand-based discovery features like brand feeds and filters were available in only a small number of categories, but they’ll expand to more categories over time. When a listing is clearly tied to a brand, either by selecting it directly or using a strong title and description (for example, “Lululemon Align Leggings, NWT”), buyers can find it more easily and our systems can better understand it.
This matters because buyers are exploring more than ever. Cross-category shopping is up 75%, with buyers moving between categories and discovering new items along the way. Brand details help your inventory show up beyond a buyer’s usual categories, especially for trending brands like Free People, Nike, Skims, and Halara.
When listings are clear and specific, buyers know what they’re getting and are more likely to trust and engage. At the same time, these details give our discovery systems stronger signals, helping your shows and listings surface more consistently as the marketplace grows.
How to use it: Make sure your listings have clear and accurate brand information filled out. Correct brand tags, specific titles, and clean descriptions help your show get discovered across more categories and drive steadier traffic over time.
Turn timely interest into sales: pre-bid expirations
Pre-bids are one of the strongest signals you get as a seller. They tell you what buyers want before items ever run. That early intent is incredibly valuable, and now, it’s more reliable than ever.
This month, we rolled out Pre-Bid Expirations, a change designed to protect buyers but ultimately make pre-bids work better for sellers.
In the past, pre-bids could stick around even if a show was moved days, weeks, or months, tying up buyer funds and leading to drop-off over time. Now, if a show is moved 24 hours or more, all existing pre-bids expire and buyers are notified to re-bid if they’re still interested. That means any pre-bid you see reflects real, current buyer demand.
For sellers, this turns pre-bids into a powerful planning tool. Instead of guessing what to run next, you can filter your Live Shop by pre-bids to see which items buyers are already excited about and bring them up when the room is ready. This is especially helpful for higher-ticket items where building momentum ahead of time matters.
Moving your show 24+ hours will reset pre-bids, so keeping your show time steady helps preserve the demand you’ve already built. The payoff is fewer missed sales, smoother shows, and more predictable results.
How to use it: When you see pre-bids, buyers are ready. That’s your signal to stick to your timing if possible and prioritize those items to turn interest into sales.
Happy Selling!
– Whatnot Product Team