Whatnot Announces First Seller Summit in Austin and New Shipping Rules
Whatnot is hosting its first-ever in-person seller event on April 25 in Austin, and it’s already sold out. The inaugural Whatnot Seller Summit runs a full day at The LINE Austin on 111 East Cesar Chavez Street, starting at 8 a.m.
A waitlist is open for anyone who didn’t grab a spot, and the company says future summits are in the works.
The agenda runs two tracks, covering sourcing, live-show production, buyer retention and scaling operations, plus hands-on workshops led by Whatnot staff and top sellers.
Tom Verrilli, Whatnot’s Chief Product Officer, and Andy Tu, VP of Marketing, are on the speaker list. The company says seller community leaders will lead the tactical workshop sessions.
The summit lands in the middle of a shipping policy overhaul Whatnot kicked off earlier this year. As of February 13, the platform started using its own in-app scanner and Whatnot Manifest data to decide whether a package went out on time, instead of leaning on USPS carrier scans alone.
Since March 2, sellers are on the hook for refund costs on late shipments if they can’t show a valid drop-off through one of the approved tools.
Whatnot says the new tools were a response to USPS acceptance-scan delays, which had been dinging sellers who actually shipped on time but couldn’t prove it through carrier data.
The numbers behind the policy push are sizable. Whatnot says it cleared more than $8 billion in live gross merchandise value in 2025, more than double the prior year, and added 20 million-plus new accounts. Per the company’s 2026 Live Selling Report, 53 percent of sellers now pull the majority of their yearly sales from live commerce — up from 41 percent the year before.
Whatnot hasn’t named any other summit cities or dates yet. Sellers who missed Austin can sign up for the waitlist on the company’s summit site.
The new shipping metrics are live and staying, and sellers are being pointed to the in-app scanner or Manifest tool to log drop-offs and keep account health in good standing.
