Adore it or hate it, it’s a must to admit Temu had a banger yr. Launched in late 2022, the Chinese language-owned ecommerce website, recognized for promoting an unlimited array of astonishingly reasonably priced items, took solely two years to turn into a family identify within the US. Over the previous 12 months, it has topped obtain charts, surpassing different viral apps like ChatGPT and Threads, and now operates in dozens of nations all over the world. Even its largest rival, Amazon, not too long ago launched a Temu clone known as Amazon Haul that carefully resembles the unique, each by way of its logistics provide chain and person interface.
Temu is projected to earn greater than $50 billion in complete gross sales this yr, in accordance with analysts from AB Bernstein and Tech Buzz China, probably tripling its 2023 determine. Temu’s web site now will get nearly 700 million visits worldwide each month, and Apple not too long ago revealed it was the most downloaded app of 2024 on iPhones within the US.
Temu has now absolutely changed Want, an earlier cut price on-line procuring website, within the cultural lexicon because the signifier of knockoffs or budget-friendly alternate options. The winner of the latest Timothée Chalamet lookalike contest in New York Metropolis, for instance, calls himself “Temu-thée Chalamet.” Tens of hundreds of thousands of odd folks have tried out the app, lots of whom discovered about it by one in every of Temu’s seemingly unavoidable and relentless promoting campaigns. At this level, your grandma might be obsessive about Temu, too.
“My family and friends members who did not know what it was in 2023 do now,” says Moira Weigel, an assistant professor at Harvard College who research transnational on-line marketplaces. “Random kin who know that I examine China or ecommerce will say, ‘Oh, you have to know all about Temu,’ in a method that didn’t occur a yr in the past.”
Weigel says that Temu has performed a couple of issues proper, together with figuring out the right suppliers in China, concentrating on applicable buyer segments, and discovering an affordable method to ship merchandise from one to the opposite. That allowed the procuring platform to defy early analyst predictions that it might rapidly burn by its money reserves and flame out.
Temu, which is owned by PDD, one of many largest ecommerce giants in China, is transferring and pivoting at a pace that its Western counterparts can’t actually grasp, says Juozas Kaziukėnas, founding father of the ecommerce intelligence agency Market Pulse. “While you take a look at an organization like Temu, it is going a thousand miles an hour,” he says.
