Whether you love it or hate it, you have to admit that Temu has had a great year. The Chinese e-commerce site, which launched in late 2022 and is known for selling a wide range of amazingly affordable goods, took just two years to become a household name in the US. Over the past twelve months, it has topped the download charts, surpassing other viral apps like ChatGPT and Threads, and is now active in dozens of countries around the world. Even its biggest rival, Amazon, recently introduced a Temu clone called Amazon Haul that is very similar to the original, both in terms of logistics supply chain and user interface.
According to analysts at AB Bernstein and Tech Buzz China, Temu is expected to reach more than $50 billion in total sales this year, potentially tripling its 2023 figure. Temu's website now receives nearly 700 million visits worldwide every month, and Apple recently revealed that it was the most downloaded app of 2024 on iPhones in the US.
Temu has now completely replaced Wish, a previous online shopping site for bargains, in the cultural lexicon as the signifier of knock-offs or budget-friendly alternatives. For example, the winner of the recent Timothée Chalamet lookalike contest in New York City calls himself “Temu-thée Chalamet.” Tens of millions of ordinary people have tried the app, many of whom heard about it through one of Temu's seemingly inevitable and relentless advertising campaigns. Right now your grandma is probably obsessed with Temu too.
“My friends and family members who didn't know what it was in 2023 know it now,” said Moira Weigel, an assistant professor at Harvard University who studies transnational online marketplaces. “Random relatives who know I'm studying China or e-commerce will say, 'Oh, you need to know all about Temu,' in a way that didn't happen a year ago.”
Weigel says Temu has done a number of things right, including identifying the right suppliers in China, targeting the right customer segments and finding a cheap way to ship products from one to another. This allowed the shopping platform to defy early analyst predictions that it would quickly burn through its cash reserves and burn out.
Temu, owned by PDD, one of China's largest e-commerce giants, is moving and pivoting at a speed its Western counterparts can't really comprehend, says Juozas Kaziukėnas, founder of e-commerce intelligence firm Marketplace Pulse. “If you look at a company like Temu, it's going a thousand miles an hour,” he says.
