Chinese are just good with ecommerce and mobile; Temu rises
From LinkedIn news: "There's a new top dog in the online retail marketplace. Temu, which launched last September and sells everything from apparel to electronics, has already skyrocketed to the top of the app store charts in the U.S., according to CNN. The discount online superstore — owned by Chinese company PDD Holdings — had more app downloads than Amazon, Walmart and Target in the fourth quarter of 2022 and has held its ground atop the charts in 2023.
However, it remains to be seen whether Temu, which aired a 30-second commercial spot during last week's Super Bowl, will be able to maintain its incredibly low prices for a sustained period of time, said Coresight Research CEO Deborah Weinswig. Temu has more than 11 million monthly active users and has been downloaded 24 million times." This post explains this company.
Over the past four months, a little-known shopping app has quietly overtaken TikTok, YouTube, and Amazon to become the most downloaded free app in both the Apple App and Google Play stores in the U.S. Launched last September, Temu is a discovery-based shopping app that offers users a personalized feed of recommended and relatively inexpensive products, in addition to searchable categories of products. Users can also earn credits and better deals if they play certain in-app games (e.g., raise a family of digital fish to earn a $12 pair of shark slippers) or recommend the app to their friends on their social media feeds.
Fans of the site say Temu is taking off because it offers a wide range of products, including from brand names, at dirt-cheap prices; Lenovo wireless earbuds, for example, are available for just $8.98. Critics dismiss Temu’s current top status as the result of Pingduoduo, Temu’s Chinese parent company, being willing to spend big on paid marketing to draw in customers. But these cursory observations about pricing and marketing spend, while true, obscure two major insights about Temu’s launch in the U.S.