Love it or hate it, you have to accept it ago had a banger year. Launched in late 2022, the Chinese-owned ecommerce site, known for selling lots of amazingly cheap items, took just two years to become a household name in the US. In the last 12 months, it has topped the download charts, surpassing other viral apps such as ChatGPT and Poisonsand now operates in many countries around the world. Even its biggest rival, Amazon, recently introduced a I’m scared of being a clone called Amazon Haul which is similar to the original, both in terms of logistics supply chain and user interface.

Temu is expected to generate more than $50 billion in total sales this year, according to analysts from AB Bernstein and Tech Buzz China, potentially tripling its 2023 figure. Temu’s website has now been taken down almost 700 million visits around the world every month, and Apple recently revealed that it is the most downloaded app in 2024 on iPhones in the US.

Temu has completely replaced Wish, an earlier bargain online shopping site, in the cultural lexicon as a signifier of knockoffs or budget-friendly alternatives. For example, the winner of the recent Timothée Chalamet lookalike contest in New York City, calls himself “Ago-thee Chalamet.” Tens of millions of ordinary people have tried the app, most of whom learned about it through one of Temu’s seemingly inevitable and relentless advertising campaigns. At this point, your grandmother Maybe Temu was surprised too.

“My friends and family members who don’t know what it will be like in 2023 are doing it now,” said Moira Weigel, an assistant professor at Harvard University who studies transnational online markets. “Random relatives who know I’m studying China or ecommerce will say, ‘Oh, you should know all about Temu,’ in a way that didn’t happen a year ago.”

Weigel says Temu did a few things right, including identifying the right suppliers in China, targeting the right customer segments, and finding an affordable way. to send products from one to another. This allowed the shopping platform to defy earlier analyst predictions that it would quickly burn through its cash reserves and burn out.

Temu, owned by PDD, one of China’s biggest ecommerce giants, is moving and pivoting at a speed its Western counterparts can’t quite understand, said Juozas Kaziukėnas, founder of ecommerce intelligence firm Marketplace Pulse. “When you look at a company like Temu, it’s a thousand miles an hour,” he said.