Temu e-commerce detonates the market: advertising war, user trust becomes the key
In 2023, in addition to the craze caused by ChatGPT around the world, Chinese e-commerce company Pinduoduo launched a cross-border e-commerce platform called Temu. Its crazy expansion in 48 countries including North America has also become a hot news in the world.
Temu will be launched in the United States in September 2022. It uses a wide range of cheap products as a selling point, claiming that users can "shop like a billionaire." In less than a year, it has been launched in 48 countries. The total number of APP downloads has reached 200 million times, and it has more than 100 million active users in the United States alone.
According to data disclosed by research organization Similarweb, as of December 2023, the number of independent users of Temu has reached 467 million, ranking second and equal to AliExpress. Amazon ranks first with 2.659 billion users, and SHEIN ranks third with 172.3 million users.
Temu's lightning expansion is due to low prices, full hosting and aggressive and efficient marketing strategies.
Unlike other e-commerce platforms, Temu adopts a "fully managed model" to provide sellers with one-stop services, including product listing, store operations, logistics fulfillment, after-sales and other aspects. Sellers only need to focus on supply and form a cooperative relationship with the platform. Under this model, the platform assumes the responsibilities of product sales, marketing, logistics, etc., while sellers focus on producing and supplying products. This model reduces overall costs by vertically integrating the supply chain, making shopping on the platform more economical.
Huge traffic growth is also inseparable from crazy advertising. From January to November 2023 alone, Temu's advertising expenditure in the US market will be as high as 510 million US dollars, focusing on important marketing periods such as the "Super Bowl", "Back to School Season" and "Black Friday".
Sky Canaves, a senior analyst at Insider Intelligence Company, said that this kind of advertising marketing is successful, and Temu is grabbing the user time of leading e-commerce applications such as Amazon.
According to data from Apptopia, the average daily time spent by active users on the temu platform continues to grow. According to the agency's device-level analysis, users spent an average of 18 minutes a day on the Temu app in the second quarter last year, compared with 10 minutes on Amazon and 11 minutes on AliExpress. In addition, the report also stated that the time spent on temu among young users was 19 minutes, which is higher than the average.
However, not all is rosy as reviews from customers paint a different picture. Temu has a rating of only 2.41 out of 5 on the Better Business Bureau, and only 1.81 stars out of five out of five customer reviews. It can be seen that Temu has not yet gained the trust of local consumers.
For the young Temu, although he has already made his mark in the global e-commerce market, the challenges that come with it are gradually emerging. In order to ensure continued growth and maintain its leading position in growth, Temu needs to seriously think about how to build a more solid user base and improve the profitability of the platform. The establishment of a loyal user base requires not only providing an excellent user experience, but also continuous innovation and advancement with the times. Therefore, Temu needs to formulate a more robust marketing strategy and deeply explore user needs to ensure continued development.