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 enormous array of astonishingly reasonably priced items, took solely two years to develop into a family title 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 world wide. Even its largest rival, Amazon, just lately launched a Temu clone referred to 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 whole gross sales this yr, in line with analysts from AB Bernstein and Tech Buzz China, probably tripling its 2023 determine. Temu’s web site now will get practically 700 million visits worldwide each month, and Apple just lately 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 buying website, within the cultural lexicon because the signifier of knockoffs or budget-friendly alternate options. The winner of the current Timothée Chalamet lookalike contest in New York Metropolis, for instance, calls himself “Temu-thée Chalamet.” Tens of tens of millions of extraordinary folks have tried out the app, a lot of whom realized 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 family members who know that I research China or ecommerce will say, ‘Oh, you could know all about Temu,’ in a means that didn’t occur a yr in the past.”
Weigel says that Temu has achieved just a few issues proper, together with figuring out the right suppliers in China, concentrating on acceptable buyer segments, and discovering a reasonable strategy to ship merchandise from one to the opposite. That allowed the buying platform to defy early analyst predictions that it might shortly 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.