‘Whatnot looks like all of e-commerce’: Chief Product Officer Tom Verrilli

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When it comes to adopting AI, live shopping platform Whatnot’s Chief Product Officer Tom Verrilli says it is ahead of legacy e-commerce platforms simply because it was born at the right time.

“We’re still new enough that most of the systems we’re building are new and therefore stand to gain immensely from powerful new AI tools,” Verrilli told Retail Brew.

On Tuesday, Whatnot rolled out four new AI tools, two to support product listings and two to support fulfillment. Sellers can use their phone camera to generate product listings in less than five seconds with Snap List and add new items during a live realtime with Live List, the company said. To speed fulfillment for merchants, Automated Shipping Profiles pick the right shipping label from a photo, and Proof of Drop Off lets sellers scan labels at drop-off.

The platform, founded in 2019, operates in nine countries and sells items across more than 140 categories. Weekly livestream content on Whatnot has reached 20 million minutes, while viewer watch time has tripled YoY. The growth extends to top sellers too—the number of merchants earning more than $1 million in lifetime sales has more than doubled in 2025, Verrilli said.

Verrilli spoke with Retail Brew about how Whatnot is thinking about AI and the evolution of liveshopping as AI embeds itself deeper within e-commerce.

What’s the throughline that connects these four new AI tools?

We basically took a look and said, “Listen, there’s 5 million listings a day being created. How can we just make that faster and easier for sellers?” Because, ultimately, it just helps them scale their business. And, in particular, if AI can very reliably help people take what is otherwise tedious and a slow series of tasks—you know, how big or heavy is this pair of shoes?—is the thing that you need to know before you can buy the right shipping label. Why would we not automate that for them and let them get back to the thing that makes it really special? They’re great salespeople. They’re incredibly knowledgeable about their products. They run really big businesses, and so, that’s the start point for every feature we build. And it turns out, AI is just a really powerful technology for accelerating that.

What are some of the bestselling categories on Whatnot?

I think the things that you’ll see that really pop in the non collectibles—obviously, fashion is huge on Whatnot. And in particular, it started very much in folks doing the internet version of thrifting. Because there isn’t a TJ Maxx of the internet right now. There isn’t a place where I can go and thrift. But if you look, sneakers, luxury bags, beauty, and fragrances—all of these categories are undergoing enormous growth on Whatnot on both our new sellers as well as on the demand side.

And then it’s really fun to see new categories keep emerging. Electronics is increasingly popular, and I think it’s going to be a really big category. And more and more, Whatnot looks like all of e-commerce. It’s just done in a very unique way, where—again—I can see you, I can talk to you. It’s a very high-trust environment.

How is the world of AI changing live shopping and what it looks like on Whatnot?

My honest answer is, hopefully, as little as possible, except to make it possible for us to serve every one of our sellers better and faster. Because at the core of how we build has always really been, “How do we make this as high-trust, high-quality for a buyer and as easy as possible for a seller to come start their business here?”

A long-running example of that, if you have historically sold on most e-commerce platforms as a seller: After you sell an item, you have to go and buy a shipping label and source it yourself. And it’s a very manual task, and it eats into your margins quite heavily. On Whatnot, shipping has always been fully integrated. So the buyer as part of their purchase is always quoted a shipping price, and as a seller, as soon as you finish your sale, we have purchased that label for you, and it’s available for you just immediately to print and ship.