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Love him or hate him, you have to admit that Temu had a fantastic year. Launched in late 2022, the Chinese-owned e-commerce site, known for selling a wide range of surprisingly affordable products, took just two years to become a household name in the United States. For the past 12 months, it has topped download charts, surpassing other viral apps like ChatGPT and Threads, and now operates in dozens of countries around the world. Even its biggest rival, Amazon, recently introduced a I’m afraid of cloning called Amazon Haul which looks very similar to the original, both in terms of its logistics supply chain and its user interface.
Temu is projected to earn more than $50 billion in total sales this year, according to analysts at AB Bernstein and Tech Buzz China, which could triple its 2023 figure. Temu’s website now receives almost 700 million visits worldwide every month, and Apple recently revealed that it was the most downloaded 2024 application on iPhones in the US
Temu has now completely replaced Wish, a former online shopping site, in the cultural lexicon as a synonym for knockoffs or cheap alternatives. The winner of the recent Timothée Chalamet impersonator contest in New York City, for example, calls himself “Ago-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 grandmother He’s probably obsessed with Temu too.
“My friends and family who didn’t know what it was in 2023 now do,” says Moira Weigel, an assistant professor at Harvard University who studies transnational online markets. “Randomly, family members who know I study China or e-commerce will say, ‘Oh, you must know all about Temu,’ in a way that didn’t happen a year ago.”
Weigel says Temu has done 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. That allowed the shopping platform to defy analysts’ early predictions that it would quickly burn through its cash reserves and go extinct.
Temu, owned by PDD, one of the biggest e-commerce giants in China, is moving and pivoting at a speed that its Western counterparts can’t really grasp, says Juozas Kaziukėnas, founder of e-commerce intelligence firm Marketplace Pulse. “When you look at a company like Temu, you’re going a thousand miles an hour,” he says.
