When the entire world seemingly shut down for the COVID-19 pandemic, the way we behaved changed at a fundamental level. While the world paused, nature seemed to heal, and more and more of our activities took place on the internet. As our habits began to change, so to did our shopping habits, leading to the rise of e-commerce giants like Temu, a Chinese-American collaborative company that first opened its doors in 2022.
Honing in on the idea of Team Up, Price Down (TEMU), the team at Temu has embraced next-gen manufacturing as well as collaborative metrics to bring savings to consumers while raising profits for their brands and business partners.
Today, we are going to dive into the world of Temu to understand better how the system operates and why it has been so successful in recent years.
Is Temu Too Good to Be True?
A cursory glance at the home page of Temu will lead shoppers to ask themselves a single question: is this place for real? With seemingly bottomless prices and a massive inventory spanning over 29 categories, it is easy to see why people think Temu might be too good to be true. Temu is real and is as good as advertised, thanks to their collaborative approach to selling products.
Temu utilizes a Team Up, Price Down approach to working with brands and buyers. By providing valuable data-driven metrics to sellers while incentivizing buyers to participate in the communicative process, Temu has been able to curate a system that tailors itself to the needs of its shoppers and sellers. As this system has been perfected, costs related to marketing and overstocking have gone by the wayside.
Market Research and Consumer Insights
Online shoppers have already become acclimated to low prices from major retailers like Walmart and e-commerce platforms like Amazon. As a result, Temu has had to adopt innovation at an early stage to keep up with the large market. By taking from companies like Amazon and Wal-Mart, Temu hopes to perfect what each does best.
Temu collaborates with sellers on design and product ideas while streamlining savings by manufacturing products specifically tailored to potential consumers. The outcome has been easy to see and easier to enjoy: savings, reduced prices, and heightened consumer satisfaction. Along the way, Temu hopes to change the way that consumers associate low prices with low-quality products, improving outcomes for everyone along the way.
Temu has based its entire business model on the idea that both the supply chain and data infrastructure can help businesses to sell products at a profit while reducing the margin for buyers. Temu is one of the first to depart from the Amazon approach to instead offer a consumer-to-manufacturer system for both product development and the forecasting of its demand.
