Is Amazon changing in This?

Photo Illustration: Intelligencer; Photos: Amazon

Here’s an experiment you can try yourself. Open a category on Amazon—Electronics, Toys, Home & Garden, whatever—and scan the first page for an unbranded product or perhaps a semi-branded product like IOCBYHZ, BANKKY, or KLAQQED. Look at the product photos and description and note the price. Then try finding the product on Temu, a discount app with Super Bowl ads, and see how much it costs. Then try finding it on AliExpress, the international e-commerce arm of the Chinese group Alibaba, or on TikTok. Finally, you can look for it on Alibaba itself, where it may also be available, shipped directly from China.

Sometimes, not always, but more often than you might expect, it works. Take this dress from CUPSHE , listed on Amazon for $47.99, with over 4,200 mostly positive reviews. On Temu , where it also ships for free from a “local” (read: national) warehouse, it’s listed as a “Women’s Casual Boho Dress with Lace Trim and Floral V-Neck, Long Beach Dress for Cocktail Party, Maxi, Wedding Dress” and costs just $16.49. On TikTok Shop , it’s on a flash sale with free shipping for $27. On AliExpress , it’s available at a variety of prices from different sellers, for $9.90 with $9.60 shipping, or, on sale, with free shipping with a supposed 85.2% chance of arriving within 14 days for $8.66.

Photo illustration: Intelligencer; Photos: Temu, TikTok Shop, Amazon and AliExpress

I didn’t order these dresses, so I can’t confirm they’re exactly the same, or that one isn’t a knockoff of the other. I also don’t know enough about long boho dresses to say that they’re a knockoff of a design outside the world of cheap e-commerce.

Photo: Amazon

But then again, that’s not unusual. One popular speaker, for example, labeled T&G, sells for $15.75 on Amazon, $8.38 on Temu, and $4.94 with free shipping on AliExpress. That’s clearly… inspired by the popular speakers from 78-year-old JBL, which also sell on Amazon, albeit for a hefty $89.95 discount.

Photo: AliExpress

The process works across categories: A pair of bike shorts costs between $19.99 and $11.77 and $2.30; a foldable utility cart costs between $95 and $38.99 (indistinguishable from the one our family bought on Amazon in 2023 for $110.59). Are they the exact same products? Maybe, and in many cases, probably. It’s possible they’re made from the same reference designs by different factories; in other cases, they might be sold by the same sellers on different platforms.

But to anyone willing to spend a little time comparing the big online stores, it’s clear that something’s happening: Amazon is becoming more and more like Temu, TikTok Shop, Shein, and AliExpress, while Chinese e-commerce platforms are becoming, at least in America, more and more like Amazon. The big stores all sell the same unbranded imports from China, sometimes at very different prices, and they’re converging on similar logistics strategies: Temu is moving vendors’ inventory to U.S. warehouses to shorten shipping times; Amazon plans to launch a special discount section for products that ship from overseas in about a week.

In the broadest sense, this is a familiar story. Different stores offering some of the same products at different prices and with varying levels of convenience are also the stories of big box retailers and grocery stores. But this one is different in ways that are obvious and others that are more subtle. These aren’t chain stores offering occasional discounts on branded products with a suggested retail price, but rather marketplaces full of sellers who individually set prices for anonymous products based on fluctuating inventory rates, shipping, and cuts made by e-commerce platforms. Plus, the products we’re talking about range from junk to solid unbranded alternatives — that’s basically discount shopping. You might get 90 percent off a fast-fashion T-shirt or some knockoff home decor, but you won’t get the outrageous deal that Temu has on, say, a PlayStation, although Power buy them there, which wasn’t entirely true when the store first appeared on the market.

These companies approach the same e-commerce strategy from very different positions. Tomu, the international arm of e-commerce giant Pinduoduo, is spending big money to expand into foreign markets, including the United States, in many cases subsidizing shipping and prices and reportedly operating at a huge loss; AliExpress has made slower progress with its product, which is more of a cross-border marketplace, with long shipping times and minimal domestic marketing.

Amazon’s foray into cross-border e-commerce predates companies like Temu and other competitors. Since the late 2010s, most of Amazon’s sales have been attributed to third-party sellers, many of whom pay the company significant fees for logistical support (warehousing, shipping) and advertising. This strategy has worked out well for Amazon in a number of ways: It shifts market research and risk to sellers; instead of stocking its own products, the company charges sellers to stock theirs; the company is now the third-largest player in digital advertising, behind Meta and Google, largely because of the fees Amazon charges sellers for visibility ON Amazon. It also changed the product in more complicated ways. American sellers, many of whom sourced or manufactured their products overseas, soon found themselves competing with sellers with more direct ties to Chinese factories; Amazon, for its part, courted foreign sellers. American sellers were built to look like the middlemen they were, in a sense—the companies they built were less of a brand than Amazon’s highly rated, reviewed offerings, and the manufacturers they worked with knew exactly what their margins were.

Now something similar is happening to Amazon as a whole. As the platform moves downmarket, becoming more hostile to established brands whose products are being undercut and in some cases simply stolen, competitors from China are attacking it from below, working with some of the same manufacturers and sellers to portray Amazon as a middleman with unnecessarily high prices. While Amazon initially pushed cross-border e-commerce on its own terms, it now does so defensively.

Amazon still has a huge advantage here. It is profitable, widely loved and trusted, and still used by tens of millions of Americans to buy popular products from recognizable brands. Customers who use it to occasionally buy a CUPSHE dress, which Amazon AND Third-party sellers charge huge markups, and they probably buy batteries or detergents, too. And no company, foreign or domestic, can match Amazon Prime’s shipping infrastructure.

But there are obvious risks, too. Customers like cheap things, but they like cheaper things more. It’s not clear whether Amazon can profitably win the race to the bottom, or whether it will damage its reputation by trying. Amazon risks making its marketplace completely hostile to more established brands and hostile to domestic sellers, some of whom have called its Temu-style plans a “slap in the face.”

Then there are the customers. The ornate nine-dollar dress on AliExpress is an ethical and ecological nightmare, a semi-disposable garment of sewn-together outer parts. But so is the one on Amazon—which is also something worse, at least in the eyes of the market: a really bad deal.