Temu sweeps the US market, and established giants face challenges

As a rising star in the cross-border e-commerce platform, Temu is entering the ranks of large e-commerce platforms. In the United States, the number of repeat customers attracted by Temu exceeds that of eBay Inc, an e-commerce pioneer with nearly 30 years of history.

According to the latest survey of 1,000 American consumers by marketing company Omnisend, 34 % of consumers shop on Temu every month , while the proportion on eBay is 29%. In other words, Temu's appeal to users has surpassed eBay .

Since its establishment in 2022, Temu has been rising rapidly, one of the main reasons for which is the ultra-low prices of platform products. Secondly, with the support of its parent company Pinduoduo, Temu also has a combination of "huge advertising expenditures", "large-scale coupon distribution" and "gamification strategies".

Take Temu 's "Shop like a billionaire" ad as an example . It cost Pinduoduo more than 10 million US dollars to appear in the Super Bowl twice. In addition, Temu also promoted it vigorously on social platforms and search engines. Of course, the effort paid off. This promotion method attracted a large number of consumers to shop on the platform, even if these customers had to wait a week or more to get the purchased goods.

In the words of Greg Zakowicz, senior e-commerce expert at Omnisend, (Temu's achievement) shows that Temu's aggressive marketing approach - such as Super Bowl advertising and social media campaigns - is paying off.

In addition, prices affected by inflation have also greatly changed consumers’ shopping behavior. According to an annual survey by EMarketer, 40% of online shopping journeys in the United States started from Amazon in 2022, and this proportion exceeded 50% in 2022.

However, nearly 30% of consumers started their shopping journey on search engines such as Google last year, and this proportion will be 25% in 2022. The increase in the proportion of search engines also shows that for price-conscious consumers, they hope to compare prices through more retail websites and platforms in order to find more suitable prices. This also provides opportunities for the development of emerging platforms such as Temu.

In response, an Amazon spokesperson said the company will continue to innovate to "provide the best selection, value and convenience." eBay has no comment yet.

However, eBay is not sitting still. This month alone, eBay has made a lot of moves.

For example, at the beginning of this month, eBay announced that it had upgraded its credit rating function. The updated credit rating function can promote image ratings to all sites and is applicable to all types of listings; buyers can display product information more intuitively, thereby increasing the click-through rate of products and the number of times they are added to the shopping cart. In addition, eBay has also launched an AI product image enhancement function for sellers to help them convert product images into professional-level images to promote sales.

Temu

USA

user