Temu vs Shein: How to Choose the Right Cross-Border E-commerce Platform in 2025?

As major social media platforms debate who attracts more consumers between Temu and Shein, the selection in front of cross-border sellers is equally crucial. Both platforms attract a large number of consumers with their ultra-low prices and rich product categories, bringing unprecedented opportunities to cross-border sellers.

How to choose the most suitable cross-border e-commerce platform for yourself? We will delve into the product categories, pricing strategies, and multi-account operations of Temu and Shein, helping you achieve greater sales on both platforms.

Overall Comparison of Temu and Shein

Product Categories

• Temu adopts a full-category platform model, ranging from household items to electronics, from clothing to beauty products, creating a complete online shopping ecosystem, focusing on model effectiveness and product category coverage.
• Shein has a strong focus on fashion, gradually expanding into beauty and home categories in recent years, but its core competitiveness still lies in the clothing sector, with a focus on trendiness.

Product Quality

In terms of quality, the two platforms present distinctly different management styles.

• Temu primarily relies on seller self-management and user review systems, with product quality often showing a duality—there are both high-quality products and poorly rated ones. For sellers, to enhance sales, more investment in user review management is needed, as the quality directly impacts sales volume.
• Shein has established a unified quality standard, from material sourcing to production inspection, ensuring that each product has a consistent quality control. This guarantees a stable shopping experience for consumers.

Pricing Strategy

• Temu uses factory direct sourcing and competitive pricing models to push prices to the extreme, quickly attracting price-sensitive consumers and creating market share advantages. For sellers, maintaining a competitive pricing strategy requires relying on model effectiveness and supply chain optimization.
• Shein employs a value-based pricing strategy, maintaining a balance between competitive pricing and product quality assurance. However, it also adopts promotional strategies to attract users, maintaining user retention.

Shipping Speed

• Temu: Products from Temu usually come from suppliers around the globe, and shipping times can vary due to the shipping origin. Generally, delivery times can range from 7 to 15 working days, depending on the buyer’s location. There may be options for expedited shipping in certain areas, but this often incurs additional costs.
• Shein: Shein has its own warehouses and logistics centers in multiple countries, often able to provide faster shipping services. In the U.S., Shein’s standard shipping times typically range from 3 to 7 working days. Expedited shipping options are usually available within 1 to 3 working days, but similarly require additional costs.

Affiliate Marketing Strategies of Temu and Shein

Both Temu and Shein support affiliate marketing to gain a certain proportion of revenue from inviting new users.

• Temu offers multiple levels of incentives. New user registrations can earn rewards of up to 3-5 USD, with a commission rate reaching 10-20%, and Temu particularly emphasizes social sharing and group buying methods, turning every consumer into a promoter.
• Shein’s affiliate marketing focuses more on long-term value and brand engagement. The base commission rate remains at 10-15%, combined with tiered rewards and promotional activities. Affiliates can access detailed data analysis, material support, and industry guidance, with lower entry barriers. Shein also emphasizes collaboration with KOLs to enhance brand visibility through new product trials and unique promotional activities.

For casual shoppers, Temu’s promotional strategies are more attractive, often offering various rewards, including free products. In contrast, Shein’s offerings are more mature in terms of brand engagement, making both platforms viable options.

How to Choose the Right Cross-Border E-commerce Platform for Yourself?

Entering Temu: Ultimate Test of Supply Chain Capability

Temu’s platform requirements for sellers can be summarized in three points: cost efficiency, stable supply capability, and fast response.

Quality requirements are relatively simple, with a focus on business operation compliance and product quality inspection reports. However, the actual entry threshold can be high—sellers need to bear significant pricing pressure, while also ensuring stable supply capabilities.

Temu’s overall management model means that sellers lose pricing power and user connection, shifting the model to pure commodity suppliers.

The key to success lies in finding products with significant cost advantages, avoiding falling into the homogenization competition. Categories like home goods and electronics have already entered the red ocean market, while some emerging niche categories still have opportunities.

Entering Shein: The Starting Point of Brand Operations

Shein’s requirements for sellers are more focused on operational capability and brand influence. In addition to basic business quality standards, the platform pays more attention to the cross-border e-commerce experience and product differentiation.

Shein provides sellers with more operational autonomy. Sellers need to be responsible for store decoration, product listing, and marketing promotions, which increases the operational capability required for this team.

For sellers with certain experience in cross-border e-commerce, Shein offers a broader growth space. Through refined operations and brand building, sellers can gradually improve customer unit price and profit margin, achieving sustainable growth.

How to Enhance Your Product Selling Price?

Whether it’s Temu or Shein, both platforms have adopted strict policies in store management, ensuring the professionalism and quality of products. Single stores are only allowed to sell products of a single category, such regulations help maintain the overall shape of the platform and allow consumers to find the products they need more accurately when shopping. If sellers wish to sell multiple categories of products at the same time, they should open multiple independent stores to create a more dynamic selection.

Due to the platform’s account monitoring, if a single device directly logs into two stores above, it can easily create connections. Is there a secure tool to help manage multiple accounts? DuoPlus Cloud Phone is undoubtedly your best solution!

DuoPlus Cloud Phone allows you to create multiple Android phone environments, each cloud phone has a real ARM chip architecture, capable of generating unique device identification information. You can use the cloud phone to manage multiple Temu and Shein accounts, and each account is isolated, without the need for additional physical devices. Not only does it reduce your costs, but it also makes management easier.

How to Realize Multi-Account Management for Temu/Shein?

1. Open the DuoPlus official website (https://www.duoplus.net/ ), click on “dashboard” to register your account using your email address.

2. Purchase the number of cloud phones you need, and complete the initial setup and configuration (this is your first account, looking like a real user’s key step).

3. In the DuoPlus APP, search and preload Temu or Shein to your created cloud phone, you can use batch installation features, meaning this APP will directly install to your selected multiple Android devices, making operations more efficient.

4. After creating the appropriate Temu/Shein accounts, you can view them as if on a real phone browsing cross-border e-commerce platforms.

Temu’s cost efficiency and Shein’s operational depth each have their advantages. When you choose to use DuoPlus to create multiple environments, you can not only help you manage multiple cross-border e-commerce store accounts, but you can also use it to participate in affiliate marketing campaigns, receiving promotional rewards.

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