How worried should Amazon be about Shein and Temu?

“Shop like a billionaire.” With that enticing slogan Temu touted itself to Americans watching the Super Bowl on February 11th. Football fans had been treated to a similar advert from the e-commerce company at last year’s event. But this time the message was hammered home. In all, Temu’s ad played five times. That won’t have been cheap. A 30-second slot during this year’s Super Bowl cost around $7m. JPMorgan Chase, a bank, reckons the company will spend $3bn on marketing this year, up from $1.7bn in 2023.Temu, based in Boston, is an offshoot of Pinduoduo, a Chinese e-commerce firm. It is attempting to replicate the success of Shein, a Chinese fast-fashion seller, which shot to success in America in 2021 helped by clever marketing and ultra-low prices. In their bid to win over American shoppers the duo are spending so lavishly on digital ads that their footprints show up in big tech companies’ earnings. On February 1st Susan Li, the chief financial officer of Meta, a social-media giant, said that Chinese advertisers contributed 10% of her firm’s revenue last year and five percentage points to its worldwide revenue growth. In November Josh Silverman, the boss of Etsy, an online marketplace for artisan knick-knacks, blamed Temu and Shein for pushing up the price of digital advertising.