Buy low, sell low.

Hauling and hoarding.

09 May

Terry Nguyen, Dirt's senior staff writer, on the shopping app Temu and a new Dirt investigates query.

Spring is in full bloom, and the seasonal shoppies have come for my wallet. “Women be shopping,” to quote Dave Chapelle (as Reggie Warrington), an impulse that has been abetted by Temu, the new shopping sheriff in town. Temu is a shopping marketplace, similar to Amazon and Wish, that is a subsidiary of the Chinese e-commerce platform Pinduoduo. In recent months, the shopping app has skyrocketed to the top of App Store charts even before making its formal stateside debut in a well-timed Super Bowl ad, which pitched Temu to recession-fearing Americans as the app that allows you to “shop like a billionaire” because its offerings are so goddamn cheap. (Given how Jeff Bezos sourced his atrocious Coachella ‘fit from Amazon, the ad’s slogan is… not untrue.)

A recent New York Magazine deep-dive into Temu describes it as the offspring of Amazon and TikTok. Its interface, however, is unlike any of its aforementioned parents’: Temu’s home page is a chaotic display of products, resembling a general discovery feed with a search bar at the very top. It reminds me of AliExpress, a Chinese marketplace saturated with affordable goods, owned by Alibaba Group. In-app promotional pop-ups, a common feature across Asian shopping apps, contribute to the gamified buying experience. The fast fashion giant Shein deploys similar blithe techniques to keep users shopping. However, the Amazon x TikTok observation isn’t wholly inaccurate: As a marketplace for third-party sellers, Temu clearly takes after Amazon, but the TikTok comparison has arisen, more or less, from the app’s Chinese roots, not from any video or influencer component. This framing is funny to me, as new Asian “super apps” are eyeing the North American market for expansion.

With TikTok and now Temu, Americans have fixated on the apps’ overseas origins as a foreboding sign of the times. Temu and Amazon are stocking “the exact same items produced by the same labor, differentiated by just a few days or a few dollars,” reports NY Mag’s John Hermann. But our attitudes towards Temu are like that of a distant father who only sees the mother’s features in his bastard child’s face, incapable of recognizing his role in its creation. Temu’s emergence as an Amazon competitor reflects an inevitable shift in e-commerce—born, in part, from the profit-seeking priorities of most American retailers.

For decades, US brands have been comfortable outsourcing core aspects of their manufacturing process to factories in China and across Asia. Profits were high, cost of goods production was low. Now, Chinese factories and entrepreneurs are realizing that “they have shot at building a brand themselves and selling directly to the world, without the intermediary” of, say, Amazon or Walmart. Thanks to TikTok, there’s never been a better time to sell cheap stuff and knockoffs online. The price of goods, too, have bottomed out: American consumers are accustomed to low prices and convenient privileges. To renege on these luxuries, like free shipping or free returns, will cost US retailers dearly.

The last few weeks have been full of talk about the end of the 2010s, from a digital media perspective, but a similar, slow-burn reckoning is poised to occur in the e-commerce world. The buy low, sell low model that made Amazon, Walmart, Target, and major US retailers rich—and engendered a micro-economy of dropshippers—won’t be tenable for much longer. Temu, AliExpress, and its ilk can sell for even lower.

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DIRT INVESTIGATES

  • My friend Kylie, who writes for Jezebel, recently informed me of a weird trend that she has noticed on Hinge. She would match with a man, who would start the chat by saying something along the lines of: “I’m not sure if your profile is AI-generated. Can you answer some questions to prove that you’re a real person?” Kylie told me she’s received at least three other messages like this, and has become unsure whether it’s an attempt at a zeitgeist-y pick-up line, a mark of a deeply insecure and/or paranoid man, or a sign of our AI-generated times. I am thankfully off the apps, so please email [email protected] with any related tips and anecdotes.

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