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Journalists all over the globe rely on our insights and data for their stories. Here are some of the most recent articles Marketplace Pulse was featured in.
As such, RedNote is probably just a cultural blip, at least where brands are concerned, according to Juozas Kaziukėnas, founder of Marketplace Pulse.
“RedNote is a blink of a moment, like a small, knee-jerk reaction thing,” he said. “It’s not going to be the place for TikTok users to go and somehow continue doing their thing.”
“We’ve seen tractors for sale. We’ve seen furniture for sale. We’ve seen e-bikes for sale,” said Juozas Kaziukėnas, founder of Marketplace Pulse.
“Early on, Temu focused on being able to shock consumers with these super cheap items over time. It’s trying to do less of that,” he said. “If anything, Temu is trying to not only sell more expensive items but also sell more items at the same time to increase the average order value and thus achieve better unit economics.”
The loss of TikTok Shop as a marketplace in the U.S. will also have a detrimental impact on the growth of live shopping in the country. Although social media channels like YouTube Shorts and Instagram Reels “have replicated the core TikTok experience” and therefore will see users and creators migrate to those platforms, they are not social commerce platforms, according to Juozas Kaziukėnas, founder and CEO of Marketplace Pulse. As such, a TikTok ban will significantly erode the growth of live shopping in the U.S.
As Kaziukėnas put it, “While brands that sell through TikTok Shop will shift their ad budgets and focus to other channels, those will not be social commerce.”
Temu, which is owned by PDD, one of the biggest ecommerce giants in China, is moving and pivoting at a speed that its Western counterparts can’t really grasp, says Juozas Kaziukėnas, founder of the ecommerce intelligence firm Marketplace Pulse. “When you look at a company like Temu, it's going a thousand miles an hour,” he says.
Kaziukėnas believes the most important thing Temu did this year was quickly switch its focus away from shipping small packages through air cargo and start building local inventory supply chains in the US and other countries. “This year, it started with 100 percent of goods coming from China; now in the US, 50 percent of them are coming from local warehouses. For Western marketplaces, these types of changes would have taken years,” Kaziukėnas says.
Whether Temu can overcome these hurdles will depend on how fast the company can adjust its supply chain and pivot away from the most troublesome aspects of how it operates—before regulators take action. “What Temu was, is, and what Temu will be in the future are perhaps different things,” Kaziukėnas says.
Juozas Kaziukenas, founder of Marketplace Pulse, said that indicates a certain agility some critics didn’t think the company had.
“The biggest change [to low-cost e-commerce] this year was the aggressive move to storing inventory locally, or to selling inventory that is already stored locally, as opposed to shipping goods from China. That, I think, is most applicable to Temu,” Kaziukenas said. “Knowing that de minimis changes are coming…this is only going to get accelerated next year.”
None of this has stopped sales numbers from breaking records.
The way Juozas Kaziukėnas, founder and CEO of Marketplace Pulse, sees it, “You’re either competing with China [or] you’re sourcing from China [or] you’re dealing with upcoming tariffs on Chinese goods, or you’re competing with Chinese platforms.”
Most of these merchants are based in China, according to estimates by ecommerce intelligence firm Marketplace Pulse.
Durch die Investitionen erhöhen sich jedoch auch die Kosten; die extremen Billigpreise sind noch weniger zu halten als zuvor. „Der verrückte Preisvorteil, den sie in der Vergangenheit hatten, ist verschwunden“, urteilt Juozas Kaziukėnas, Chef des Analysehauses Marketplace Pulse.
Juozas Kaziukėnas of research firm Marketplace Pulse noted that big Chinese merchants try to hedge against the possibility of a ban by operating hundreds of seller accounts, often under a variety of names and addresses.
Juozas Kaziukėnas, founder and CEO of Marketplace Pulse, told Retail Brew that it’s early days for Haul. Amazon has not marketed the service so far—a sign that it’s still in its test and learn phase.
“We’ve not seen ads on Facebook or Google, and we’ve also not seen ads inside of Amazon itself,” Kaziukėnas said.
“It’s a soft launch for Amazon, and I think that people that have discovered it have found it accidentally in the Haul tab, at the top of their app, or perhaps many of them also kind of saw it in the news,” he added.
But Kaziukėnas was quick to add that people are indeed buying items on Haul because they have begun to show up on Amazon’s bestsellers list for random and niche items like bestsellers in sewing rickrack, or in women’s novelty head wraps, or in machine tools lamps, to cite a few examples.
“We’ve been tracking Amazon bestsellers for a very long time, and Amazon Haul products are now slowly starting to appear amongst the best sellers on Amazon…They’re [showing up] in the niche, small categories, but they are starting to appear there,” Kaziukėnas said.
Juozas Kaziukenas, founder of e-commerce intelligence firm Marketplace Pulse, wrote in a November blog post that his firm tested Rufus by requesting gaming TV recommendations. The chatbot’s response included products that were not TVs. When asked for the least expensive options, Rufus came back with suggestions that weren’t the cheapest, Kaziukenas said.
Meanwhile, Temu is onboarding Chinese merchants to store inventory in the U.S., a move that would allow the company to not be as exposed to changes around the de minimus trade rule, said Juozas Kaziukenas, founder of e-commerce intelligence firm Marketplace Pulse.
“If you’re a brand and you find yourself competing with Shein and Temu, do something else,” said Juozas Kaziukenas, founder of e-commerce research firm Marketplace Pulse. “It’s a terrible business environment to end up with competing with someone that is ultimately pushing for the lowest price.”
Temu has made progress recruiting U.S. sellers in the last few months, including Amazon’s largest merchants. Five of the top 25 biggest Amazon sellers, according to Marketplace Pulse, now sell on Temu. Still, U.S. merchants represent less than 1% of Temu’s estimated 300,000 total sellers, Juozas Kaziukėnas, founder and CEO of Marketplace Pulse, said in an interview with Modern Retail. It will take time to see whether Temu’s wide open marketplace will attract more U.S. sellers to join.
“It’s true right now that Temu wants U.S. sellers, but I’m not sure if U.S. sellers want Temu,” Kaziukėnas said. “For now, Temu has practically no U.S. sellers, and Temu has to prove itself that it’s a good marketplace for those sellers.”
“It’s almost a bizarre twist to the history of Amazon and to the things it’s been building for so long,” said Juozas Kaziukenas, founder of market research firm Marketplace Pulse. By offering customers even lower prices on certain items if they’re willing to wait, “Amazon is in some ways admitting that e-commerce is not one-dimensional.”
Still, it may not be enough to slow down Temu and Shein.
Haul, currently in beta, is only available through Amazon’s app or on its mobile site for now. Kaziukenas compared it to other niche shopping channels Amazon has launched over the years, like its home for high-end goods, called Luxury Stores; its Etsy clone, Amazon Handmade; or its TikTok Shops competitor, Inspire.
“It has many of these sections of Amazon that theoretically exist yet in practice are not seen by many consumers,” Kaziukenas said. “[Haul] feels like a reaction and like a sort of a hobby project.”
While family warehouses are meeting some of the demand, their capacities are limited and make up a fraction of e-commerce logistics, according to Juozas Kaziukėnas, founder of e-commerce analyst firm Marketplace Pulse. “As sellers become more successful, they will inevitably need larger space and more volume,” Kaziukėnas said. “So your bedroom service will very quickly run out of capacity.”
“We’ve definitely seen Amazon increase their margins over the past couple of quarters,” said Juozas Kaziukėnas, founder and CEO of retail research firm Marketplace Pulse.
Kaziukėnas said Temu’s heavy reliance on digital ads—usually ads that promote specific products—shows how the retailer hasn’t become a mainstream name for U.S. consumers.
“Relative to other retailers, Temu has a high ratio of sales coming from advertising,” he said. “It has very little stickiness and perpetually has to spend on advertising to remind people that it exists.”
“The business model of growth through Amazon seller acquisitions, which defined aggregators, is dead,” said Juozas Kaziukenas, founder of Marketplace Pulse, which has tracked industry capital raising.
Interestingly, Marketplace Pulse’s research at the time showed that 40% of sellers were Australian locals. The other 60% were mainly from China.