Like it or hate it, you must admit Temu had a banger 12 months. Launched in late 2022, the Chinese language-owned ecommerce web site, identified 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 all over the world. Even its largest rival, Amazon, not too long ago launched a Temu clone referred to as Amazon Haul that intently resembles the unique, each when it comes to its logistics provide chain and consumer interface.
Temu is projected to earn greater than $50 billion in whole gross sales this 12 months, based on analysts from AB Bernstein and Tech Buzz China, doubtlessly tripling its 2023 determine. Temu’s web site now will get almost 700 million visits worldwide each month, and Apple not too long ago revealed it was probably the most downloaded app of 2024 on iPhones within the US.
Temu has now totally changed Want, an earlier discount on-line purchasing web site, within the cultural lexicon because the signifier of knockoffs or budget-friendly options. The winner of the current Timothée Chalamet lookalike contest in New York Metropolis, for instance, calls himself “Temu-thée Chalamet.” Tens of hundreds of thousands of unusual folks have tried out the app, a lot of whom discovered about it by way of 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 relations who know that I examine China or ecommerce will say, ‘Oh, you could know all about Temu,’ in a method that didn’t occur a 12 months in the past.”
Weigel says that Temu has completed a number of issues proper, together with figuring out the proper suppliers in China, focusing on acceptable buyer segments, and discovering a cheap option to ship merchandise from one to the opposite. That allowed the purchasing platform to defy early analyst predictions that it could shortly burn by way of 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 velocity that its Western counterparts can’t actually grasp, says Juozas Kaziukėnas, founding father of the ecommerce intelligence agency Market Pulse. “Once you take a look at an organization like Temu, it is going a thousand miles an hour,” he says.
