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Temu, which has grown wildly amid doubts, has once again refreshed the platform sellers' perception of "low prices".
It is learned that recently, many sellers have reported that Temu is starting a new round of price cuts. According to reports, once the platform detects that the prices of Temu sellers' products are too high, a "product price reduction reminder" will pop up in the background, requiring them to reduce the prices after the price verification is approved. Otherwise, it may affect the product's traffic and order volume, and restrict the application for stocking. It is worth mentioning that some sellers said that Temu has further implemented the "lowest price model" in this round of price reduction. When checking prices, some sellers found that Temu suggested lowering the prices of their products to a few cents or even a few cents. At the same time, many sellers were devalued and banned from stocking because they disagreed with the price review: "It's outrageous. There are more than a dozen price reduction notifications popping up on my account every night. If you don't agree to the price review, you can't put the product on the shelf." “After refusing to review the price four times in a row, Temu has now banned them from stocking the product.” Based on this, Temu's operation quickly sparked heated discussions in the industry. Some sellers said that this is not the first time Temu has lowered prices, but compared with the past, this round of price cuts seems to be more severe. It may be that there are too many similar products, and they want to use this to make some sellers give up their products . Some sellers also associated the situation of "being prohibited from stocking goods if they disagree with the price review" with the new regulations introduced by Temu in March. It is understood that in March this year, Temu introduced a new rule based on the newly added concepts of "high-price declared rate" and "high-price declared amount" : once the high-price declared rate ranks in the bottom 5% or the high-price declared amount is too high, the relevant sellers will be restricted from listing new products or limiting the withdrawal amount. In other words, the 95% high price rate of declared prices will become a red line that sellers cannot touch, and prices will be forced to be reduced if they exceed this level. According to feedback from multiple parties, after the new regulation was implemented, many Temu sellers received high price rate notifications in their backends. Some sellers even mistakenly clicked on the "Get exemption benefits for the next 30 days with one click", which caused the store with the same main body to automatically reduce prices, resulting in huge losses. There is no doubt that both this new regulation and the new round of price cuts recently launched by Temu are bad news for platform sellers as their profit margins will be further squeezed. But for Temu, these operations are new weapons that take low-price tactics to the extreme and further enhance its multi-market share. After more than a year of launch, Temu has been making great strides in overseas markets, from its emergence in the fiercely competitive North America to its crazy expansion to more than 40 markets. Prior to this, Pinduoduo's vice president of finance had repeatedly stated that Temu's current focus is to expand the market, rather than to make profits. However, even with the advantage of low prices, Temu's global expansion journey is by no means an easy road.
Recently, according to industry sources, following TikTok, whose future is still uncertain, Temu also seems to have been "targeted" by the United States. It is understood that the news quoted a report from the American media @Washington Times on April 8 local time. The report stated that compared with TikTok, Pinduoduo's cross-border e-commerce platform Temu is a "more worrying data security threat" and listed a series of so-called "reasons for the threat", requiring Congress to immediately launch an in-depth investigation into Temu. It is understood that the accusations against Temu in this report are similar to the reasons for the previous accusations made by the United States against TikTok. Both indicate that the company to which the platform belongs is headquartered in China, which means that "China can use this platform to collect American user data." Many industry insiders believe that the essence of this accusation is that Temu, which is manufactured in China, has developed too rapidly in the United States, posing a certain threat to local American platforms . Sensor Tower data shows that as of January this year, Temu has more than 50 million monthly active users in the United States, a year-on-year increase of 300% , and the number of app downloads has exceeded 123 million. After returning to the Super Bowl in February, Temu's traffic has once again surged: the number of app downloads on that day increased by 34% compared to the previous day. In fact, this is not the first time that Temu has been targeted. Not long ago, another US media @Wall Street Journal also reported that the US Customs will strengthen the import review of low-value packages, aiming to crack down on e-commerce giants including Temu who exempt import tariffs through low-value packages. It is worth mentioning that as Temu's influence overseas continues to expand, not only the United States but also other countries have begun to regard Temu as a major threat to local e-commerce and have strengthened their supervision of it: In March this year, the Irish regulator was conducting a comprehensive review of companies within the scope of the DSA (Digital Services Act), and Temu has received business inquiries related to the Digital Services Act; On April 9, local e-commerce platforms in South Korea called on the government to introduce appropriate measures to deal with the challenges posed by the low-price strategies of Chinese e-commerce platforms such as Temu and AliExpress.
The above regulatory policies have undoubtedly created certain obstacles to Temu's global expansion plan. The BBC called the regulatory policies faced by Temu "the inevitable disaster for Chinese companies going overseas . " From a rational point of view, Temu's low-price model is also a double-edged sword: it is a weapon for accelerating its global market expansion, but it also attracts the attention of the local market and strengthens its supervision. At present, Temu's future is still facing variables, and what path it will eventually take can only be determined by time.
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