Headquartered in San Francisco, global eCommerce marketplace Tophatter provides a discovery shopping experience, recreating the fun of browsing in a store on your phone. And with its unique fast-paced auction format, Tophatter Shoppers can win great deals on jewelry, electronics, apparel, health & beauty, and home & hobbies products. The company sells over 100k items a day from thousands of merchants based around the world.
Comparably spoke to Elizabeth Upton, Head of Merchant Operations, and Aimee Valle, Director of Buyer Experience, about how the company altered course as soon as the COVID outbreak started in China, where two of the company’s offices and many of its merchants are based. In times of global strife, Tophatter stayed true to its core value of doing everything for its people.
PIVOTS DURING THE PANDEMIC
Elizabeth Upton: We have several core values at Tophatter, which help drive our company decisions. Everything from business initiatives to hiring—these shared beliefs lie at the core of the choices we make. One of those values is we do everything for our people and during the pandemic outbreak, we had this value on the top of our mind.
As a marketplace, we have two sets of customers: Shoppers and our merchants—and we see them both as an extension of the people we talk about in our core values. When something as widespread as COVID-19 happens, we hear about its impacts from every angle. To ease burdens where we could, in February we waived all commission fees for refunded orders for merchants whose shipments were stuck in China during closures. Similarly, as money may be tight for many households these days, we identified Tophatter Shoppers who we believe had overpaid for COVID supplies (such as toilet paper or hand sanitizer) and proactively reimbursed them.
Aimee Valle: We saw a 4700% increase in searches for toilet paper as people started self-quarantining, but we chose to give our Shoppers fair prices—reimbursing thousands of people who paid above market value for essentials due to increased Shopper competition in the auctions. We also blocked the sale of N95 respirators early on, mindful that healthcare workers in the field should have primary access to available supply.
A CULTURE THAT DOES EVERYTHING FOR ITS PEOPLE
EU: Tophatter’s people-first culture on a company scale is generally buoyed by each employee’s mental health and well-being. In that regard, our People team has taken time to build an internal suite of resources to keep us connected while we are apart. Everything from a directory of health providers who take online appointments, to Zoom happy hours, to walking competitions and meditation sessions, to a gift box of fun things to have at home during quarantine—we are using this time to stay healthy and to build new connections. Our COO, Sree Menon, leads us in a Zoom meditation every week that we’ve dubbed “Menonation.”
EMPOWERING TALENT ANYWHERE
AV: In what coincidentally became a very timely key initiative, we started 2020 intending to learn how we can empower talent anywhere, which we have leaned into as the future workspace may not look exactly as it did before. This work-in-progress includes creating a more collaborative meeting style where non-live attendees can still be informed and add-value, adopting asynchronous All-Hands meetings, and upgrading our tools and mindset to support talented people who share our values, wherever they may be.
A SAFER FUTURE
AV: Through the fallout of COVID-19 was of course unpredicted, Tophatter was quick to do everything it could to support our team. First, in China, where we have offices in Shanghai and Shenzhen, Tophatter supported our colleagues and their families there, during a tough time. And in the US, Tophatter was ahead of the curve when it came to closing the office and creating policies to help everyone work remotely—accommodating families, providing a stipend for at-home work setups and better internet, and creating opportunities for us to feel connected as a team.
EU: We also recognize that there are others outside of the Tophatter community who are risking their lives to ensure a safer future for all of us. To support them on the front lines, we leveraged our supply networks to source much-needed respirator and surgical masks. In total, we donated 8000 respirator masks to UCSF hospitals in the Bay Area and 70,000 surgical masks that were divided between hospitals, medical centers, and nursing homes in need, all around the country.
