I learnt about this in my Business analytics degree and I’m going to break it down for you.
Temu isn’t shipping your order from a factory in Shenzhen the moment you tap “buy.” They moved away from that model a while back. What they run now is a demand forecasting operation: they collect order data by region, figure out which products people in, say, Yaba or Lekki keep buying, then ship bulk quantities of those products to fulfilment warehouses already inside the UK or US. Your order never left the country. It was already sitting in a warehouse 40 miles from you before you even opened the app.
This is standard supply chain logic. Amazon has been doing it for years. What makes Temu interesting is how aggressively they’re applying it at scale. They’re working backwards from purchase history, search behaviour, and even abandoned carts to predict what needs to be stocked where, weeks before the demand actually lands. By the time you order a #5000 phone stand at 11pm on a Saturday, there’s a reasonable chance 200 of those phone stands are already in a depot near you because the data said they would move in your postcode cluster this weekend.
It’s called inventory pre-positioning, and the predictive layer underneath it is machine learning working on millions of rows of transaction data daily.
The “made in China” framing still applies to where the product was manufactured. That part’s accurate. But manufacturing and fulfilment are two completely separate steps, and people keep conflating them.
What Temu figured out is that fast delivery is a conversion driver, so they invested in the forecasting infrastructure to make it possible without eating the cost of next-day air freight on every order. The warehouse does the work. The algorithm fills the warehouse.
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@ManzunzuN No, if it was the EcoCash system and done in a way that is not embarrassing to the company I'd say yes, a normal X account is not all that, it's just like yours, technically
@BabesweHunters If you look at the current socio-economic woes faced by youth coupled with whats happening to some breadwinners illegally staying in xenophobic South Africa. You'd know this mbinga nonsense is stupid just as stupid as the asker and the poster, both are nimroded bafoons!