Learn how to validate your startup idea by pre-selling it, for only $80 (includes a free 1-hour consultancy call).

Zulily

Online retailer that offered daily deals
Startup Cemetery

Divvy, BILL’s spend and expense management solution, is one of the easiest and most efficient ways to manage your company spend.

Get started →
GENERAL INFORMATION
Category:
e-Commerce
Country:
United States
Started:
2009
BUSINESS FAILURE
Outcome:
Shut Down
Cause:
Bad Marketing
Closed:
Active
FOUNDERS & EMPLOYEES
Number of Founders:
2
Name of Founders:
Darrell Cavens, Mark Vadon
Number of Employees:
1,000-5,000
FUNDING
Number of Funding Rounds:
5
Total Funding Amount:
$194.6M
Number of Investors:
7

Divvy, BILL’s spend and expense management solution, is one of the easiest and most efficient ways to manage your company spend.

Get started →

What was Zulily?

Zulily was an online store dedicated to moms and children clothing and 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.

The site also promised to be an eco-friendly site that would plant a tree for each new purchase on the site in the name of the buyer’s child.

Zulily

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.

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.

Go on Reading

The All-In-One Newsletter for Startup Founders

Every week, I’ll send you Failory’s latest interviews and articles and 3 curated resources for founders. Join +25,000 other startup founders!