The main culprit for the downfall of the popularity of Zulily is poor marketing and user-attention strategies. Most notably, in order to access the search engine and databases of Zulily’s shopping items, the platform required from new visitors to give their email address prior to even seeing what the online store had to offer. This marketing trick met with a lot of criticism since it violated some basic marketing principles. Zulily initially achieved a record success with the number of new subscribers who registered on the site, but 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 inadequate marketing strategy and front-page email request 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 invitation 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.