Online Chinese web site Temu is surging in Australia, with the Chinese online juggernaut shipping millions of dollars’ worth of goods during Black Friday, their pricing makes a mockery of called discount pricing at the likes of Drummond Golf or even Kogan, because their prices are ridiculously cheap and the quality of their goods excellent as ChannelNews found out.
They have already also stripped tens of millions of dollars’ worth of Black Friday deals away from traditional retailers in Australia because of what has been described as “genuine low prices”.
Their bizarre offerings are mocked by retailers but it’s Temu who is having the last laugh having already massed over 1.5M customers in Australia with the Chinese business already having built out 48.2 million monthly average users in the US as of the end of October 2023.
While it took Amazon nearly a decade to build out their base Temu is just 27% less than Amazon after less than 18 months in the market, according to app-tracker Sensor Tower and they have done it in record time.
Temu’s website attracted about 100 million visitors in November, making it the seventh-most popular retail website in the US behind Amazon, eBay, Walmart and others, according to estimates by SimilarWeb.
Last night Temu, filed a lawsuit in a U.S. District of Columbia court alleging that arch rival Shein employed “Mafia-style intimidation” to coerce suppliers that also worked with Temu.
According to the filing, Boston-based company WhaleCo, which operates in the U.S. as Temu, alleges China-founded, Singapore-based rival Shein misused intellectual property legislation to stop merchants and suppliers working with Temu.
In Australia they are already outperforming most mainstream retailers with the exception of the likes of Bunnings, JB Hi Fi and Amazon. retailers.
This is because their pricing is radically cheap, and the products they ship which often arrive days after ordering are of a high quality.
Take a visit to the Drummond Golf store and you will find range finders ranging in price from $165 to the top end $899 Bushnell Pro X3. 
Intrigued I went to the Temu web site where I found a selection of what appeared to be good quality golf range finders that ranged in price from A$64 to $170.
In the end I ordered one that matched the specs of the Drummond Golf $899 Bushnell Pro X3 which in the USA where Temu is charging ahead is selling for A760.
The big difference was the price and specs of the Temu range finder, instead of $899 the model I ordered was only $78 and when it arrived, I was blown away by the quality, performance and above all the specs which were better than the more expensive Bushnell product.
After inspecting the Bushnell offering, I found that my Temu Golf Laser Rangefinder came with LCD Display, USB Rechargeable Range Finder with Slope Function Flag Locking Vibration, and voice broadcast of the distance measured.
The $79 Temu purchased Golf View Finder with fully interactive LCD display.
It was also extremely accurate when measured against a Garmin range finder and the manual was extremely good.
So, whose ripping off who.
What Temu is doing is lining up with manufacturers of products and only charging a small margin.
Eliminated is retailer margin, distributor margin, certain taxes, marketing margin as well as allowances foe warranty returns.
Temu suppliers simply ship you a new product if there is a problem.
While the savings are massive at Temu, the reality is that compared with the Bushnell pricing you are going to be able to go through 11 Temu range finders before you are up for the $899 retail sticker price of the Drummond Golf Bushnell Pro X3 model.
The big question is how Temu makes money and how big a threat are they to the likes of Amazon, Kogan or everyday retailers in Australia.
Temu is owned by PDD Holdings a business that has gone from zero to rivalling Amazon.com and Walmart in the USA in just over a year.
New research reveals that shoppers are spending almost twice as long on Temu, then they are on the apps of major rivals like Amazon.com according to research firm Apptopia.
On average, users spent 18 minutes per day on the Temu app in the second quarter, compared with 10 minutes for Amazon and 11 minutes for Alibaba Group Holding Ltd.’s AliExpress which is not as popular in Australia.
Talk to any users of Temu in Australia and they will tell that their app is addictive, and this is deliberate and a key marketing tool.
It allows users to play games to win rewards, including spinning a roulette-like wheel to win a coupon — which goes up in value if you buy something within 10 minutes.
The Temu app is available in more than 40 countries, though none have taken to it like customers in the US, where it has been Apple’s top app most days this year and sales have well and truly surpassed bargain-shopping giant Shein.
Temu founder Colin Huang, wanted to make the online retail upstart different from traditional services like Alibaba and Amazon by incorporating features from the game companies he had run before.
Temu shoppers get bargains by hunting for products and then telling their friends about deals they can land together.
They also collect discounts by spinning roulette wheels or raising virtual fish in an app. Huang’s idea was to make shopping online more fun — and more social — than what the competition was offering.
Through Temu, people in Australia are now getting a taste of the company’s game-like features and rock-bottom prices.
In the US, the app made a splash in February with its “Shop Like a Billionaire” Super Bowl ad — and quickly became one of the most downloaded in the country.
Temu.com was the fastest-growing multi-category retailer over Black Friday, with traffic up 84%, compared with 2% at Amazon.com, according to the research firm SimilarWeb.
Temu’s revenue in the third quarter likely grew more than 300% to about $1.8 billion, according to Zhu and the other Bernstein analysts.
They estimate Temu will see a $3.65 billion operating loss this year on sales of $13 billion, but they expect it to turn profitable in 2025 or 2026.
