Whatnot Has Americans Hooked on Livestream Shopping

Since discovering the liveshopping app Whatnot in September, Virginia Acosta has signed on multiple times a week, looking for deals on beauty products. She’ll open her phone and find herself on a channel where a host holds up, say, a bottle of perfume, prompting the audience to bid. The speed of these auctions, which are sometimes completed in just a few seconds of frenetic bidding, add a sense of urgency that Acosta finds irresistible.

In some cases, Acosta comes away with a great deal; in others, she spends far more than she intended to. But the net result of all the app-fueled shopping has been piles of unneeded merchandise crowding her bathroom and spilling out of the cabinets of her home in Florida. “I have more makeup now than I could ever use in a lifetime. And hair products. And every fragrance I could ever want,” says Acosta, 59, who says she regrets the thousands of dollars she’s spent. She describes the appeal as this one-two punch: “You get the dopamine of winning this very fast auction, and you get the dopamine hit of buying something at a very low price.”