People complain about how bad of a flea market Amazon has turned into, are people really shopping on temu?
Too much of Amazon is just marked up imports sold by meaningless brands.
Companies like Temu keep happening because Amazon is not operating a cost efficient marketplace and they are vulnerable. Presumably Amazon would win because of reputation and the reliability of their return guarantees, but they’ve lost their trusted status by letting their review systems be corrupted and no longer have the high degree consumer trust that gave them such defensibility.
So, some significant marketplace extraction will happen here as their suppliers essentially move up the value chain and start to eat their market, which looks like company-after-company from supply side countries making an entrance into the Western markets selling the exact same or similar products for much lower prices… exactly what we are seeing.
This flattening out of the supply chain is a phenomenon that Amazon has not done a good job of protecting against.
The only other big defense besides reputation is shipping speed and the risk annd complexity of importing, and perhaps at some point Amazon will wake up and start to lobby against the subsidized shipping policies. But in the short term they benefit from it too much to do so.
IMO, Amazon ought to reconsider the third-party strategy. At the very least, if they want to keep my interest they need a toggle that I can flip which will hide every single product that isn't shipped-from-and-sold-by-Amazon.com.
That said, for however fake or skewed Amazon's reviews are, AliExpress and Temu's reviews are another level of useless. Most of the pictures are simply of packaged items, and the reviews themselves are variations of "Just got it haven't used it yet 5 stars!". My hunch is that they ran promotions to get people to write reviews at some point and got a lot of terrible, useless reviews in exchange.
>As of last month, Temu accounted for nearly 17% of market share in the United States within the discount stores categories, according to data analytics firm Earnest Analytics.
The real question is: why don't people just use AliExpress?
I've since noticed Temu starting to tighten their purse strings a little, as the free shipping minimum is now $20 instead of $10. AliExpress has also responded to the competition and seem to be using stateside warehousing for popular items (or some other magic) to match Temu's ~10 day shipping times, so I've gone back to AliExpress for the most part. AliExpress has a wider swath of product too owing, I presume, to their many years of additional time in the marketplace.