Love it or hate it, you have to admit that Temu had a great year. Launched in delayed 2022, the Chinese e-commerce site, known for selling a wide range of goods at surprisingly affordable prices, took just two years to become a household name in the US. It has topped download charts over the past 12 months, outpacing other viral apps such as ChatGPT and Threads, and is now operating in dozens of countries around the world. Even its biggest rival, Amazon, recently introduced it I’m afraid of the clone called Amazon Haul, which closely resembles the original, both in terms of its logistical supply chain and user interface.
According to analysts AB Bernstein and Tech Buzz China, Temu will earn a total of over $50 billion this year, potentially tripling its result in 2023. The Ago page is now live almost 700 million visits around the world every month, and Apple recently revealed that it was most downloaded App of the Year 2024 for iPhones in the US.
It has completely replaced Wish, the earlier online bargain shopping site, in the cultural lexicon as a symbol of fakes or inexpensive alternatives. For example, the winner of a recent Timothée Chalamet lookalike competition in Modern York calls himself “Ago-thée Chalamet” Tens of millions of ordinary people have tried the app, and many of them learned 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 members who didn’t know what would happen in 2023 do now,” says Moira Weigel, an assistant professor at Harvard University who studies international online markets. “Casual relatives who know I’m studying China or e-commerce will say, ‘Oh, you must know all about It,’ in a way that didn’t happen a year ago.”
Weigel says Temu did several things right, including identifying the right suppliers in China, targeting the right customer segments and finding an inexpensive way to ship products between each other. This allowed the shopping platform to defy early analyst predictions that it would quickly exhaust its cash reserves and expire.
Owned by PDD, one of the largest e-commerce giants in China, it moves and spins at a speed that its Western counterparts cannot comprehend, says Juozas Kaziukėnas, founder of e-commerce analytics company Marketplace Pulse. “When you look at a company like Temu, they’re going a thousand miles an hour,” he says.