Millions of US Shoppers Downloaded This New Chinese Shopping App

Fast fashion, also known as cheap fashion, has been gaining momentum over the last few years. That market generally belongs to apps from Chinese companies or companies with a base in China and isn't known for quality but rather silly-low prices. And not just for clothes.

Apps like Wish and Shein have made headlines for selling things for dirt cheap, and also for getting a lot of downloads.

A new player joined this game in September and already managed to make its way into millions of devices, and guess what, it's also coming from China!

The app is Temu, and it's been one of the top apps in the US App Store for quite a while now. It's the #3 most downloaded app in the US App Store right now.

According to our estimates, Temu was downloaded by more than 4.7 million people since launching two months ago. While the app is available globally and has downloads in many countries, the majority of those, more than 98%, came from the US.

I was curious to see if Temu got those downloads organically or not, so I took a quick peak at our Apple Search Ads Intelligence dashboard for Temu and can you guess what I'm going to say?

Temu buys a lot of keywords! We saw ads for Temu in more than 1,700 keyword searches since the app launched in September. This growth isn't organic, and it's cheap...

Pinduoduo, the company behind Temu, is an ecommerce giant in China, so it can afford that. It's offering mega bargain prices for a variety of items -- prices that look too good to be true -- as an experiment to cut out the middleman and connect Chinese sellers with US consumers directly.

At a glance, cheap goods sound great, but is it?

Wish, a similar app with a similar offering, sells absolute trash and knock-offs to the point where some countries had to ban it entirely. In countries where it isn't banned, like the US, consumers end up with stuff that's terrible at best.

Temu joins this growing trend of money burning for the sake of saving, and with the holiday shopping season starting right about now, I foresee this trend continuing and Temu gaining even more downloads as it continues to push hard on ads.