Teleport’s Danielle Vermeer took hot new shopping app Temu for a spin. Here’s what she thought of it
Over the past few months, China’s Temu has overtaken the likes of Amazon, Shein, and Walmart to become the most downloaded free shopping app in both the Apple App and Google Play stores in the US.
Temu is a discovery driven shopping venture with ridiculously low priced clothes, home, beauty and other products.
So, what’s the secret of its success?
Danielle Vermeer, who recently left her “dream job” leading resale fashion CX at Amazon for life at fashion tech startup Teleport, decided to give it a whirl and provide her thoughts on Twitter.
In a post, she noted that “Temu has the wide selection of Amazon and the low prices of Shein”.
Just as TikTok serves an endless scroll of videos to entertain you, Temu serves an endless scroll of cheap stuff to buy, she added.
She continued: “I recently did a test buy on the app for something I couldn’t get secondhand.”
“Temu shares a histogram of the shipping times, claiming 80% of orders are delivered within 11 days. My $4 order took 10 days to deliver from China.”
“Would I use it again? Likely not, but I’m also not the target customer. Almost 100% of my wardrobe is secondhand. The reality is that most US consumers just want cheap, cute stuff, and may be willing to wait longer than two days to get it.”
Following TikTok’s lead
In an online post, Andreessen Horowitz’s Connie Chan observes that Temu is actively following TikTok’s US launch strategy.
“Like TikTok, it has a deep pocketed Chinese parent company willing to invest huge sums into its launch so it can continue growing outside of the Chinese market,” she writes.
“And like TikTok (as well as fellow Chinese shopping app Shein), it also needs a large number of users for its recommendation algorithm to work and to smartly decide what to show you next.”
She adds: “Discovery-based shopping - the core offering of Temu - is a new and fresh idea that hasn’t been explored much in the US outside of Shein.”
“Just like TikTok gives you an endless scroll of videos to entertain you, Temu serves you an endless scroll of things you might want to buy to pass the time, to inspire you, or to find things that might improve your life.”
“Think of it as the digital equivalent of walking into a Target with the aim of buying one item and walking out with a dozen, or having an algo version of the human curators that grouped content collections for you at Pinterest.”
She concludes: “While I’m betting Temu will have staying power here in the US, I’m even more excited to see how the platform introduces US shoppers to new online shopping norms and behaviours that will continue to shake up online shopping here.”
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