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Marketplace Pulse founder Juozas Kaziukenas has also been monitoring traffic to the sites in Australia and internationally.

“(Temu) will likely get to top three by the end of the year (in Australia) and challenge eBay for the second place in 2025,” Mr Kaziukenas said.

“These are web traffic figures that do not necessarily translate to revenue but they provide a sense of where the market is moving.”

Mr Kaziukenas said his New York based e-commerce intelligence firm’s analysis of the companies suggested they knew their customers well.

“SHEIN showed that direct-from-China for clothing has unique benefits – faster than fast-fashion iteration of designs. By comparison, traditional retail looks only fit to sell clothing pieces that don’t change with trends at all,” Mr Kaziukenas said.

“Temu instead is selling general merchandise goods that don’t become better by having a brand name written on them – from USB cables to kitchen spatulas.

“There are many considerations like environmental impact, over-manufacturing, supply chain resilience, etc. But we can clearly see that this model works well for some products.”

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Temu -que segons Marketplace Pulse és la segona plataforma de comerç electrònic més visitada del món, després d'Amazon- es va crear el 2022 i opera a Espanya des de 2023, amb competidors tan forts com Miravia, Shein, eBay o AliExpress.

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Other sources push back against Amazon’s rosy narrative, suggesting that while Buy with Prime is growing, it remains a niche business. Marketplace Pulse’s Juozas Kaziukėnas points out that sending inventory to Amazon remains a major barrier to entry for brands; Shopify even initially discouraged merchants from offering Buy with Prime through its storefront.

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“These apps are packed with political risk,” Juozas Kaziukenas, founder of e-commerce intelligence firm Marketplace Pulse, said. “This is clearly sort of a pre-emptive move, strategic move to avoid or, I guess, limit exposure to any regulator changes in the future.”

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Indeed, Temu has sought to protect itself from such regulatory enforcement by taking a page from one of its biggest rivals: Amazon. Since March, Temu has been onboarding China-based sellers with warehouses in the U.S., according to Marketplace Pulse. “The shift to sellers with local warehouses has reduced its reliance on the de minimus loophole, improved shipping speed and allowed it to sell more sizes and weights of products,” according to Juozas Kaziukėnas, founder of Marketplace Pulse.

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Digital was also a driver of Target’s comeback, increasing 8.7% for the quarter on the back of double-digit growth in same-day services available through programs such as Drive Up and Target Circle 360. But the company still has a long way to go to catch up with rival Walmart, according to Juozas Kaziukėnas, founder of Marketplace Pulse, an e-commerce research firm.

“Target still lags compared to Walmart, even [though] both of them rely heavily on stores for digital growth,” he wrote in an email to Retail Brew. “Walmart has been posting 20+% digital growth quarters for a while.”

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Walmart has over 420 million products on its marketplace and more than 100,000 active sellers, over a third of whom are based in China, according to research firm, Marketplace Pulse. However, it still trails Amazon, which boasts more than 2 million active sellers.

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When working outdoors, Shandas keeps his hands free for the tools he uses to measure temperatures. But for many people, this summer’s hottest accessory is a small portable fan. Google searches for “portable fans” and “neck fans” hit a five-year high, and in June they were briefly among Amazon’s top 30 most-searched terms in the US, according to e-commerce industry researcher Marketplace Pulse. Popular models, some of which come with a mister, can be handheld, worn around the neck or clipped onto a belt.

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Temu operates as an online store, carrying cut-price merchandise from self-employed sellers. More than 100,000 of them are based in China, according to Marketplace Pulse, a research firm.

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“TikTok doesn’t have the supply yet to be able to offer many great deals, and most of the goods itself are on the lower end of the price spectrum,” said Juozas Kaziukėnas, founder and CEO of Marketplace Pulse. By comparison, big-name, expensive brands like Apple dominated Amazon’s home page during Prime Day, he added.

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But the supply chain mimicry and incursion into rival turf go both ways. Just as Amazon is trying to be more like Temu and Shein, the discount platforms are trying to be more like Amazon, said Juozas Kaziukėnas, founder of the market research firm Marketplace Pulse.

If Amazon built an identity based around rapid delivery and convenience, how will the company communicate to shoppers the upside of slower delivery?

“This is not a natural fit for them. And they don’t necessarily have an advantage,” said Kaziukėnas.

Kaziukėnas also pointed to Prime Day, just around the corner, to highlight the many other shopping behaviors Amazon is trying to cater to.

“Shein and Temu are not accidental. This is the one thing these apps are focused on, but for Amazon, this is going to be priority number 17,” he said. "For all of Amazon’s prowess and strength, this is where they are starting from a point of weakness.”

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“Temu wants to be more like Amazon, to reduce supply chain risk and offer faster shipping, while Amazon is racing to replicate Temu because it cannot ignore the fact that its low prices trump Amazon's convenience for some shoppers,” said Juozas Kaziukėnas, founder of Marketplace Pulse, an e-commerce consultancy.

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TikTok’s ad strategy isn’t exactly subtle, but Juozas Kaziukėnas, an e-commerce expert who founded the business intelligence firm Marketplace Pulse, argues it’s the reason TikTok Shop has been succeeding. “I think platforms like Facebook and Instagram were never willing to overtake users’ feeds with that [shopping] content just to kick-start the platform,” he says.

“I think someone called this the enshittification of social platforms,” says Kaziukėnas, referring to the term coined by journalist Cory Doctorow describing the tendency of online platforms to become worse in quality over time.

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In recent years the number of Chinese sellers on Amazon has exploded as the retailer has prioritised independent merchants over goods that it stocks and sells itself. At the start of July, 50.8pc of Amazon’s top sellers were based in China, according to research site Marketplace Pulse, up from 25.8pc at the end of 2018.

“Anyone can see the explosion in the catalogue, tens of thousands of similar or exactly the same products with different brand names, it’s all overwhelming. But it doesn’t seem like it has hurt Amazon,” says Juozas Kaziukėnas of Marketplace Pulse, who points out that rivals such as Walmart are now following the playbook.

“For people who have been shopping on Amazon for decades, to now go back to having items come in two weeks seems like a giant step back,” says Kaziukėnas. Canaves says that while Temu and Shein’s shoppers are largely motivated by price, Amazon’s tend to value speed.

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For Juozas Kaziukėnas, founder of e-commerce intelligence firm Marketplace Pulse, its size poses another problem: the places its Western customers live in simply can not take much more stuff.

"Our cities were not built for many more deliveries," he tells the BBC.

That makes emerging economies like India, Mexico and Brazil important. But, Mr Kaziukėnas, suggests, there Amazon does not just need to enter the market but to some extent to make it.

"It's crazy and maybe should not be the case - but that's a conversation for another day," he says.

Amanda Mull points to another priority for Amazon in the years ahead: staving off competition from Chinese rivals like Temu and Shein.

Juozas Kaziukėnas is not so sure - suggesting the new retailers will remain "niche", and it will take something much more fundamental to challenge Amazon's position.

"For as long as going shopping involves going to a search bar - Amazon has nailed that," he says.

Thirty years ago a fledging company spotted emerging trends around internet use and realised how it could upend first retail, then much else besides.

Mr Kaziukėnas says for that to happen again will take a similar leap of imagination, perhaps around AI.

"The only threat to Amazon is something that doesn't look like Amazon," he says.

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“The only way Amazon could match prices was to replicate the supply-chain advantage,” said Juozas Kaziukėnas, founder of market research firm Marketplace Pulse.

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Juozas Kaziukenas, CEO at e-commerce data site Marketplace Pulse, said in the short-term not much will change because traditionally Amazon subsections haven’t been as popular as regular Prime offerings. He noted Amazon Luxury, which separates out luxury brands but which most people haven’t heard of.

“Everything is optimized for Prime, and this is not Prime,” he said. “This is very slow delivery relative to Prime. So it's not going to be a main shopping experience to consumers, and it's not necessarily going to be a big part of Amazon.”

Longer term, though he said American sellers will have to continue to differentiate themselves from Chinese competitors.

“The writing has been on the wall for a long time,” Kaziukenas said. “If you're selling generic goods, that a seller from China can sell as well and compete on price, your days are numbered.”

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According to data from e-commerce analysis firm Marketplace Pulse, new Chinese sellers have spiked in recent months. In April 2023, new Chinese sellers represented just 1.8% of all new sellers on Walmart Marketplace. By October 2023, that figure reached 24%, and by April 2024, it hit 73.8%, a record high.

It's inevitable that America's largest retailer would embrace companies in China that want to sell directly to Americans, said Juozas Kaziukėnas, Marketplace Pulse’s CEO.

"That’s [what] Amazon looks like, that’s the direction Walmart is going, and that’s how most other major marketplaces look like. The only choice is when you turn on Chinese sellers. There is no massive pool of international sellers elsewhere.”

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Target Plus has only a tiny fraction of the revenue and sellers of other third-party marketplaces. Unlike Amazon, Walmart, eBay and others, Target allows brands to join by invitation only. It has more than 1,200 sellers, according to Target. Amazon counts about 2 million sellers and Walmart has about 135,000 sellers, according to estimates by Marketplace Pulse, a e-commerce research tracker.

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Meanwhile, Amazon’s latest annual report cites a “significant” dependence on Chinese sellers, estimated by Marketplace Pulse to account for roughly half of all third-party gross merchandise value and 25% to 30% of total e-commerce on the platform. For all the chatter about Temu in the investor and operator zeitgeist, the revenue generated from Chinese-owned businesses on Amazon with names like DOKOTOO and the aforementioned NUTSAAKK is orders of magnitude bigger.

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