Whether you love it or hate it, you have to admit it Before had a bad year. Launched in late 2022, the Chinese e-commerce site known for selling a wide range of amazingly affordable goods took just two years to become a household name in the US. For the past 12 months, it has topped the download charts, outperforming other viral apps like ChatGPT and Topicsand now operates in dozens of countries around the world. Even its biggest competitor Amazon recently introduced one I’m afraid of clones called Amazon Haul, which is very similar to the original in terms of both the logistical supply chain and the user interface.
Temu is expected to generate more than $50 billion in total revenue this year and potentially triple its value in 2023, according to analysts at AB Bernstein and Tech Buzz China. Temus website now receives almost 700 million visits every month worldwide, and Apple recently announced that this is the case most downloaded App from 2024 on iPhones in the USA.
Temu has now completely replaced Wish, a former bargain online shopping site, in the cultural lexicon as a symbol of imitation or low-cost alternatives. For example, the winner of the recent Timothée Chalamet Lookalike Contest in New York City calls himself “In front of Thée Chalamet.” Tens of millions of ordinary people have tried the app, many of whom found out about it through one of Temu’s seemingly inevitable and relentless advertising campaigns. At this point, your grandma is probably obsessed with Temu too.
“My friends and family members who didn’t know what 2023 would look like now do,” says Moira Weigel, an assistant professor at Harvard University who studies transnational online marketplaces. “Random relatives who know I’m studying China or e-commerce will say, ‘Oh, you sure know all about Temu,’ in a way that didn’t happen a year ago.”
Weigel says Temu did a few things right, including identifying the right suppliers in China, targeting appropriate customer segments and finding a cost-effective way to ship products from one to another. This allowed the shopping platform to defy analysts’ early predictions that it would quickly deplete its cash reserves and burst into flames.
Temu, owned by PDD, one of the largest e-commerce giants in China, is moving at a speed that its Western counterparts can’t really grasp, says Juozas Kaziukėnas, founder of e-commerce intelligence company Marketplace Pulse. “If you look at a company like Temu, they are reaching speeds of a thousand miles per hour,” he says.
