Are Shein and Temu catching up to Amazon?

Ever wonder what exactly people are so busy looking at while scrolling for hours on their phones? Well, there’s a pretty good chance it’s Amazon. Not according to us, but the latest mobile consumer usage data from intelligence firm GWS Magnify, which found Amazon’s monthly active users to be steady at ~139 million. Per GWS, this indicates Amazon is currently the largest online retailer, outdoing the likes of Shein and Temu.

• This does not, however, mean that Amazon can relax. The threat from low-cost “challenger brands” like Shein is pretty real—it currently has 32 million monthly active users in the US, up from ~28 million in January, or 18% growth.
• For relatively new US entrant Temu, growth seems to plateaued to a certain extent, as users were up just 5% since earlier this year. But that doesn’t mean the company isn’t doing well—user figures were over 78.5 million on a monthly basis.

Besides their growing user numbers, Shein and Temu also seem to outperform Amazon when it comes to engagement.

• The average Temu user spent ~24 minutes on its app every day, compared to Shein at 12 minutes and Amazon at 11 minutes.

“The gamification of shopping is something that Temu in particular has mastered with great reward which sees customers coming back and opening the app many more times a day than Amazon,” Paul Carter, CEO at GWS Magnify, said. “But Amazon’s robust and wide audience means it is, at least for now, still the top of the pile in US online retail.”