![]() ![]() “Perhaps suggests that the West is just a much more established environment, economically and also technologically, so it’s unlikely to see these kinds of massive disruptions as you saw in China.” ![]() Amazon looks exactly the same,” says Kaziukėnas. “You see some small attempts to do these sorts of experiments, but if you zoom out and look at what has actually changed over the last 10 years? Not that much. But years later, it still hasn’t happened, and it’s starting to feel like waiting for Godot. I used to believe that livestream shopping, which is extremely popular in China, would be accepted around the world and fundamentally change e-commerce. The American shopping industry has been reluctant to accept Chinese trends. In the past two years, the idea of “social e-commerce” that Pinduoduo pioneered has been seen as one of the most successful innovations in China’s consumer tech sector.īut it’s also not clear how that idea would land in the US. It’s known for an addictive, at times manipulative, app that incentivizes people to share what they are buying on social platforms to get even steeper discounts. This is actually something Pinduoduo has done effectively in China. To go further, Temu needs to really differentiate itself from other Chinese and American shopping platforms. At one point, ads will become too expensive and too inefficient to justify the costs. “This model of relying on ads to drive every transaction does have an expiration date, and that’s what unfortunately caused the demise of Wish,” says Kaziukėnas. So will Temu be more like Shein or more like AliExpress? My sense is that so far, Temu is looking more like the latter, with its only real advantage being the price points. But people go to Shein to check out the latest fashion trend and to get it at an affordable price. Most people would go to AliExpress (or Wish, a comparable American app that sells low-priced Chinese products) only when they know they want something inexpensive. The difference in their brand images is clear. The fact that they’re made in China is secondary. By paying influencers to try out its clothes and produce glossy YouTube and TikTok videos, Shein is spreading the idea that, first and foremost, its products are fun and trendy. Shein did some things right that AliExpress didn’t-namely, marketing and presentation. Is that enough to get US consumers to use Temu? Related Story But price is only one thing people consider when they shop. I admit I’m drawn by how cheap these products are. Eighty percent of the orders would be delivered within 10 days, says the website, which is slower than Amazon but on par with Shein. Just a quick browse on Monday morning told me you could get 60-cent earrings, $4 home security cameras, $4 wireless earphones, and $6 sneakers. Otherwise, the defining feature is probably just that they’re cheap. So what are Temu’s offerings like? It has everything from clothing to kitchen products, from car parts to electronics. (For comparison: Similar Chinese apps like Shein and AliExpress have run only dozens of ads.) When it comes to app stores, Temu’s iOS ads are mostly targeting consumers in the US and Canada, while its Android ads are also in seven other countries, according to the app-store advertising database App Growing. (I didn’t even realize there were ad slots in Gmail.)Īccording to Meta, Temu has run over 1,000 ads on its platforms since September, with posts in English and Chinese. Perhaps because they are targeting Chinese readers (I saw ads in Chinese), or perhaps because I’ve made the mistake of Googling its name (for work and this newsletter in particular), the ads have popped up all over for me, including in my Gmail inbox. I know from my personal experience that at least this first part is true-I’ve been seeing Temu’s ads everywhere. That makes me believe that there’s very little organic recognition of the brand yet.” “I believe it’s driven almost exclusively by ads,” says Juozas Kaziukėnas, who founded the e-commerce analyst firm Marketplace Pulse, “because I’m seeing relatively no mentions of Temu on social media. So how did Temu rise to the top of the iOS App Store’s shopping chart? Still, Pinduoduo has remained an unfamiliar name outside the country. Today, Pinduoduo has over 730 million monthly active users-more than two times the US population!-and is known for both extremely cheap prices and innovative gimmicks that keep users hooked. Founded in 2015, it entered a market that had been dominated by Alibaba for over a decade, yet it managed to rise through the competition and, in 2020, replaced Alibaba as the company with the most e-commerce customers in China. Temu (btw, there’s no official guidance on how to pronounce the name, but I’ve been saying tee-moo) is a global version of Chinese e-commerce company Pinduoduo. ![]()
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