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Compared to Instagram, TikTok Shop makes it easier for businesses to work with up to tens of thousands of small creators and track their sales, Juozas Kaziukėnas, founder of e-commerce analyst firm Marketplace Pulse, told Rest of World. “On a platform like Instagram, it’s very unlikely that someone with 1,000 followers would ever be offered any similar deal, because the overheads of tracking for a brand would be a nightmare,” he said. “TikTok is spreading the number of potential influencers to millions or more users.”

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However, import fees could vary by product. Juozas Kaziukėnas, founder of the e-commerce intelligence firm Marketplace Pulse, told BI that many Shein and Temu products would likely face import fees between 15% and 20%.

"Everything on Temu is also on Amazon but more expensive and faster shipping," said Kaziukėnas, adding, "The price gap between the same product on Amazon and Temu is going to shrink but it's not going to disappear completely."

"Temu and Shein won't disappear and will continue to be disruptive," Kaziukėnas said. "If price is the ultimate value proposition then they'll continue to steal market share."

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“If and when this change goes into effect, it’s quite realistic that there’s going to be some period of time when deliveries just stop or start taking weeks as the system races to readjust to the increased volume,” says Juozas Kaziukenas, founder of Marketplace Pulse, an e-commerce intelligence firm.

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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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But China-based sellers make up a significant share of the company’s marketplace, representing nearly half of the top 10,000 sellers on Amazon in the U.S., per Marketplace Pulse, and driving nearly half of the third-party gross merchandise volume.

That said, Temu has taken steps to protect itself from such regulatory enforcement. 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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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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