[imagesource:pcmag]

My online shopping safety motto is ‘if it is too good to be true, then it probably is’, in which case, do not add to cart.

The bargain shopping site known as Temu is a case in point. 

With the catchy slogan, “Shop like a billionaire”, the e-commerce platform sells incredibly cheap goods (often of questionable quality) at extremely competitive prices, very aggressively, allowing Temu to leap to astounding popularity almost overnight.

I’m honestly too scared to search or mention the name for I know that’ll lead to a barrage of online adverts for R200 lounge chairs and R50 hiking boots everywhere I look.

When Temu ads ‘blitzed’ viewers during the recent US Super Bowl after launching in mid-January this year, the game was on. Even as some questioned its legitimacy, Temu’s app still shot up to second place among the most downloaded free apps on Apple devices and became the #1 most downloaded app in South Africa.

Analysts even reckon that Temu will generate a global gross merchandise value of more than $30 billion this year thanks to enthusiastic demand from more than 350 million users.

That is mindblowing. Surely seeing a ‘Smartwatch’ valued at around R300 or wireless earphones for R165 sends a ‘it’s a scam’ tingle down your spine and makes you abandon all hope for a true bargain?

Jon Cherry, a business strategist and publisher whose focus is innovation and building better brands, wrote an op-ed for the Daily Maverick, warning Saffas that Temu’s local debut should be seen as part of the dawn of a new era in consumerism. He called the big brand a “giant marketing megalodon” that has “unleashed a firehose of propaganda at a region to capture an outsized wallet share for as long as possible”.

Cherry said that putting Temu in the e-commerce category is terribly inaccurate as “its value proposition is more in line with Fortnite than it is with Amazon”. That’s because Temu’s shopping experience is so gamified that the mind-numbing process of buying stuff online becomes incredibly rewarding and addicting.

The platform is littered with games of chance straight out of a casino’s playbook, like hyping products up with surprise discounts and gimmicks, while allowing consumers to buy things together with their friends in a kind of virtual shopping club.

“The enormous number of “shoppers” it acquires then psychologically disassociate the spending of their money with actually spending money. Crafty, right?”

What that means is that people end up staying on the app longer because of the constant dopamine hits it offers, spending more money on stuff to further soothe themselves. In this way, the act of buying for buying’s sake becomes the name of the game, and it doesn’t even matter when the product arrives on your doorstep woefully rubbish because you’ve already got your fix.

“The intention is to “democratise success” for its many merchants, regardless of the quality of their products. By offering things to buy, as a game, the focus falls away from the product itself. Users are incentivised to buy volume, not brands.”

Cherry said that shoppers aren’t the only ones who need to be aware of this trend, noting that “business South Africa as a collective should be paying very close attention to what is happening here, and making sense of just how its popularity will affect trading forecasts over the medium to long term”.

“This is not just the capturing of a marketplace by a single company, but rather a tectonic shift in the structure of an economy conducted by a coordinated ecosystem of value teleported in from abroad.”

Temu’s monopoly is backed by big money. The brand has already invested a shocking amount of cash in advertising.

“Last year alone, it spent more than $3-billion on promoting the brand; a mountain of money that is equivalent to the entire market capitalisation of Old Mutual.”

You’ve also got to wonder how Temu manages such aggressively competitive prices.

The company said its low prices are made possible by a “deep network of merchants, logistic partners and [Chinese e-commerce giant Pinduoduo’s] established ecosystem built over the years,” in a statement about its operations to Time Magazine in 2022. It also claimed that they have “zero tolerance” for forced labour practices, but it is hard to believe that the prices are kept that low by not dabbling in child labour to cut down on costs.

Also beneath the glittering facade of Temu’s success lies a darker reality that also warrants serious consideration – the environmental impact of its rapid rise in the fashion industry. Temu, as one of the leading fast fashion retailers, embodies the modern consumer landscape, characterised by a quick turnover of trendy clothing items at affordable prices.

But while it’s tempting to indulge in frequent wardrobe updates at a low cost, it’s crucial to understand the far-reaching negative consequences of this trend on the environment. The environmental toll, in short, includes the glaring amount of waste that fast fashion generates (the dump of the world’s unworn clothes can be seen from space); the demand for vast quantities of resources like water, energy, and raw materials to make the products; along with how the production, transportation, and disposal of fast fashion items contribute significantly to carbon emissions.

Just know that every time you hit that ‘order’ button, a small clothing store shuts down somewhere, mother nature becomes more strained, and a labourer probably does suffer silently in a sweatshop somewhere.

[source:dailymaverick]