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Temu, which has been online for more than half a year, is expanding at a rapid pace.
After establishing a firm foothold in the US market, Temu expanded its Canadian site in February, and has since continued to enter the two emerging markets of Australia and New Zealand. Recently, the industry has released news that Temu plans to open its fifth site on the 25th of this month. Temu enters Europe, with UK as first stop According to the South China Morning Post, Temu will launch a UK site on March 25. After the new site is launched, Temu will waive sales commissions and deposit fees for all sellers on the platform.
Due to its favorable tax policies, Ireland is likely to become the location of Temu's European headquarters. Currently, Temu is looking for a local senior legal advisor. According to the recruitment information on LinkedIn, Temu requires legal advisors to have experience in privacy laws, regulations and standards in the United States and the European Union, and have a deep understanding of British/EU laws. After entering the United States in September last year, Temu topped the list of local shopping app downloads in just one month, and has continued to dominate the list ever since. With low-price subsidies to leverage the sinking market and viral marketing to attract customers, Temu's traffic and consumer influence in the United States have soared. Since 2023, Temu, which is in the limelight, has not only further expanded its market share in the United States, but has also begun to covet more potential territories.
In February, Temu made its Super Bowl commercial debut in the United States. With the huge traffic, its downloads surged by 45%, and it announced its expansion into Canada. Last Sunday, Temu announced the launch of new sites in Australia and New Zealand, and app downloads in these two markets soared immediately after the launch. As of March 13, Temu ranked 10th in the number of iOS shopping apps downloaded in Australia, and topped the list in New Zealand.
Temu's overseas expansion was timely, in line with the needs of overseas consumers to downgrade consumption under the pressure of high inflation, so it was able to achieve explosive growth in a short period of time. According to Comscore data, as of December 2022, Temu's independent visitor volume has grown to 44.5 million, surpassing a large number of mainstream e-commerce platforms in the United States, as well as SHEIN, which is on the same track.
Temu, which is advancing rapidly, claims that SHEIN is its biggest competitor in the near future and hopes to surpass SHEIN in a few years. Temu even has a bigger ambition: to position its ultimate competitors as the two e-commerce giants Amazon and eBay. Temu was sued by SHEIN for buying influencers to promote his products Since its launch, Temu has been competing with SHEIN. It not only implements the same low-price model and targets the lower-tier markets, but also repeatedly steals SHEIN's business talent and supplier teams.
Although Temu's size is not comparable to that of SHEIN, which has a deep foundation, Temu is rising strongly and becoming a threat that cannot be ignored thanks to its paid marketing + ultra-low price brute force strategy. The competition between the two is becoming increasingly fierce and has evolved from an e-commerce competition to a lawsuit.
According to a recent report by Reuters, SHEIN sued Temu in a U.S. court in December last year because Temu was suspected of impersonating SHEIN in social media marketing and bribing internet celebrities to criticize SHEIN. The case has not yet been concluded.
According to SHEIN’s allegations, Temu signed contracts with social media influencers and asked them to disparage SHEIN and mislead consumers in their promotional content. It is reported that KOLs on TikTok often mention SHEIN in Temu-related content and use them to flatter Temu in their videos. In addition, Temu was accused of using fake accounts to use SHEIN's popularity to guide consumers to download its APP . According to screenshots provided by SHEIN, the fake accounts @SHEIN_DC, @SHEIN_USA_ and @SHEIN_NYC that were discovered and deleted were created in September last year. The personal pages of the above accounts all displayed SHEIN's logo and marketing materials. SHEIN said that the links on these fake accounts directly lead consumers to download Temu's applications, misleading consumers into thinking that the two companies are related. In response, SHEIN hopes to stop Temu from continuing to impersonate it for marketing and requires Temu to compensate for the sales losses caused by malicious hype.
However, Temu did not admit the allegations and has asked the court to dismiss the lawsuit. This intellectual property dispute has attracted much attention from American consumers and has affected the reputation and consumer trust of both parties to a certain extent. If Temu loses the case, it may be forced to cut some marketing investment. In fact, the reason why Temu has been able to gain momentum quickly is not only due to the low-price subsidy + discount + free shipping strategy that is in line with Pinduoduo in China, but also inseparable from the viral marketing effect triggered by paid advertising and KOL publicity. According to the recruitment information released by Temu's marketing agency Nanopower, Temu hired a large number of Internet celebrities KOLs to put Temu's content on TikTok, Instagram and YouTube, and the marketing cost reached US$100 to US$1,000 per hour. As Temu gains more and more popularity through channels such as social media marketing, some analysts believe that it may face more lawsuits, including intellectual property rights of intellectual products and disputes at the data level. It remains to be seen whether the lawsuit filed by SHEIN will shake Temu's marketing empire. However, it is foreseeable that the competition for customers and traffic between the two sides is becoming increasingly fierce.
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