Whatnot breaks down $22 billion live shopping industry as ecommerce goes mainstream

Last December, Whatnot made some bold predictions for 2026. The social shopping hub, which combines live auctions with streaming, argued that women’s sports, loud fashion, and nostalgia would end up as three defining ecommerce trends of the new year.

Now that the calendar has flipped over to January, Whatnot is back with another big assertion. In its State of Live Selling Report for 2026, the platform contended that the live shopping industry will hit the mainstream this year — if it hasn’t already.

Whatnot’s current performance suggests that live shopping is already a big deal. To compile its report, its statisticians combed through 500,000 hours of live programming per week. All in all, Whatnot generated $8 billion of gross merchandise value from live sales in 2025, and it supported that sales volume through multiple nine-digit VC rounds.

Despite those gaudy numbers, live shopping is largest concentrated within younger generations. As recently as 2022, 80% of U.S. adults said they have never participated in a live shopping event. Whatnot’s latest report noted that Gen Z sellers between the ages of 18 and 28 have the highest average monthly live shopping revenue of any generation.

Whatnot Co-Founder and CEO Grant LaFontaine believes that the live shopping industry will become indisputably ubiquitous this year. “By the end of 2026, live shopping will be widely recognized as a mainstream and trusted form of commerce by retailers and consumers alike,” LaFontaine said. “The story will fully shift from novelty to norm. Whatnot is already setting the pace, widening our lead as we outpace the industry’s growth.”

The evidence supporting live shopping’s mainstream moment can be found in the increasing professionalization of the industry’s participants. For the first time, more than half of surveyed sellers said they generate the majority of their annual sales through live commerce. The number of Whatnot sellers earning at least $10,000 per month has more than doubled year-over-year.

Those gains are convincing Whatnot users to turn live shopping into a full-time job. Sellers now average 23 hours per week on live streaming and associated management tasks, and one in eight Whatnot sellers have transitioned to full-time gigs on the platform. The sellers who host daily streams see the strongest returns by averaging nearly $60,000 of earnings per month on Whatnot.

As for the goods sold by those streamers, that’s changing too. Women are a fast-growing demographic on Whatnot, with categories like beauty, jewelry, and women’s fashion seeing exponential growth.

Some things are staying the same, though. Baseball cards and trading card games are still Whatnot’s biggest categories, so even if 2026 reshapes the live shopping industry, some of its qualities will remain easy to predict.