In 2018, Wish — which offered unbelievably insane discounts on a wide variety of products — was the most downloaded shopping app in the world, almost doubling their revenue (from $1Bn to $1.9Bn) from 2018 to 2019.

Fast forward to 2022, and Wish has seen a 73% YoY decline in revenue and posted a net loss of $384 million (Their annual users also dropped from 107 million in 2020 down to 27 million in 2022 🤯). 📉
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Wish quarterly revenue 2019 to 2022 ($mm)

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Wish quarterly users 2019 to 2022 (mm)

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The reason?

Unpredictable service, unpredictable products, unpredictable user experience.*
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Maybe cheap prices can't buy everything.

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Fast forward to 2023, and we're in the age of Temu:

Temu — which offers unbelievably insane discounts on a wide variety of products — was the most downloaded shopping app in the world at the end of 2022 and most of 2023, over doubling their revenue (from $8.79 Bn to $14.53 Bn) from 2020 to 2021.

Fast forward to 2024, and...

‍Will cheap prices be enough to save Temu???
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We're currently working on a deep dive on Temu's user engagement/messaging strategy. Here's a sneak peek:

💬 Temu sends more notifications per week (12.67 notifications/week) than almost any other app we monitored (...outpaced only by Wish (15.11 notifications/week) and Poshmark (15.57 notifications/week)):

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🕐 Their message distribution tends to be slanted towards the morning (between 6am and 9am), while most competitors are focused on the evenings (Wish sends the bulk of their messaging between 21:00 and 24:00):

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(☝️ This actually aligns with our research. People tend to buy during the day and browse at night.)
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💬 Next we ran Temu's messaging through a semantic analysis and...

...and you'll just have to stick around to see what we found!

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So, what do you think? Will Temu be the next Wish? 🤔

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*Wish is now under new management and they say they'll turn the brand around. Time will tell!