Visitors to Shein.com are immediately greeted with multiple pop-ups advertising deep discounts. Avoid these and you'll be able to browse through product photos of varying quality. Some feature models shot in studios, others are awkwardly Photoshopped or clearly computer-generated. The Christmas sale is layered with falling snowflakes that look straight out of her Myspace page or her Livejournal blog.
Rival Temu is a similar jumble of messy text, haphazard photos, and a dizzying array of products. Users who encountered TikTok Shop after it launched in September complained that aggressive promotions of cheap, unbranded products cluttered their feeds.
For Western consumers, the disconnect between this flashy aesthetic and the multibillion-dollar retailer behind it can be a headache. Direct-to-consumer startups like Everlane and Glossier have made sophisticated online stores part of their brands. Amazon's endless grid is not a paragon of good design, but it's relatively uncluttered, with products neatly displayed on a clean white background. There is certainly no “spin and win” animated his coupon his wheel like the one that visitors to Temu.com faced this week.
But there are ways to overcome madness. Rather than adhering to Western design standards, TikTok, Shein, and Temu chose to stick to the hectic visual formula that has worked for Chinese e-commerce companies for decades., Thanks to the peculiarities of how this country came online. While design enthusiasts may turn their noses up at these choices, the overwhelming success of these platforms could change the way their Western rivals approach web and app design.
Chinese style UX
The clash of aesthetics stems from some fundamental differences in how e-commerce works in China and the West. In China, most online shopping is done on Tmall and JD.com rather than on individual brands' websites. Multi-brand retailers like Amazon, Walmart, and Target have big business in the U.S. and Europe, but brands are bigger players, especially in the high-end market.
Whereas Gucci and Zara use websites to draw visitors into their brands, making commerce an important but sometimes secondary priority, marketplaces are primarily concerned with selling as many products as possible. I am. That mindset determines the look and feel of these websites.
All of China's biggest e-commerce success stories in the West have gravitated towards the marketplace model rather than the brand model. Therefore, the homepage is full of products and coupons. Even Shein, who has become famous for his vertical business model that allows him to create lightning-fast, small-batch orders under his own name, has invested heavily in building out his third-party marketplace.
The second factor behind the business stems from the fact that most people in China first encountered the Internet through mobile phones rather than desktop computers. For a mobile native viewing products on a small screen, the products displayed on Temu and Shein look less chaotic and overwhelming.
Chinese people are also used to the so-called super apps Alipay and WeChat, which allow them to do everything from pay bills to manage bank accounts, hail taxis and, of course, make purchases. For super app users, it's less cognitively dissonant to buy a luxury handbag in the same place you pay your water bill.
“Web design works. It works,” says Oren Schaubl, founder of Valuable Studios, an agency that advises brands on digital marketing and e-commerce strategies. “They're getting things done quickly, iterating quickly, and if it's not broken, they're going to stick with it.”
Because these platforms compete on price, shoppers have lower UX expectations. Schaeuble points out that Western online stores that target mass consumers, such as Old Navy, Gap and Costco.com, are not very similar. Negative comments about the Chinese-owned e-commerce platform's design are “overblown,” he says, and the main gap in standardizing it from a Western perspective is the quality of the images.
It's no coincidence that Gen Z shoppers in the West, who, like Chinese shoppers, grew up with smartphones, are the most receptive to the Chinese look of Temu and TikTok Shop. Ashwin Krishnaswamy, a partner at consumer branding consultancy Forge Design, said younger consumers have less disposable income and are more concerned with how far they can stretch their spending than with how their online store looks.
“Younger generations are more willing to interact with something, even if it's a cumbersome and difficult to use interface, if either the content or the outcome is valuable,” Krishnaswamy said. “For 50% off, I'm willing to deal with a slightly more confusing interface.”
Gen Z isn’t just concerned about transactions. They actively reject the designs favored by previous generations. Kitschy, brash and flamboyant, his Y2K style is a deliberate choice among youth brands at all price points. TikTok is home to less sophisticated creators. The hashtag, which has been used more than 125 million times, even intentionally leans toward what appears to be “unaesthetic.”
Moving to luxury goods
Busy designs have helped TikTok, Shein, and Temu capture the lower end of the fashion market. It remains to be seen whether more expensive designer clothing can be sold in the same way.
Shein has begun to take steps to add (relatively) more premium products to its product selection through partnerships with Forever 21 and Skechers, but there are few, if any, entrants from luxury brands. Temu and TikTok are likely to follow a similar path as the market for low-margin unbranded products becomes saturated.
Doug Weiss, senior vice president of digital and e-commerce at WHP Global and previously head of creator commerce and platform partnerships at Instagram, said he wanted to start a mass-market business and move upscale. said it was more difficult than going in other directions.
Luxury brands may find it too risky to associate their carefully curated brands with social media platforms and marketplaces that adopt a cluttered look. Instagram and Amazon both struggle with this problem. And attracting high-spending shoppers can be difficult when many of the most popular brands are missing from the platform.
“Regardless of whether Gen Z shops online or not, they can't shop online if they don't have the product,” Weiss said.
But over time, Alibaba and JD.com have managed to convince luxury brands to partner in China, building a special shopping portal experience for purchasing high-end designer goods on their platforms. . In 2015, Kering Group was in a dispute with Alibaba over hosting counterfeit products. Two years later, the company decided to drop the lawsuit and opened several private-label online stores on Tmall. Temu's parent company, PDD Group, started out appealing to frugal customers in rural areas, and although it remains deal-oriented, it is now a true rival to the big two, with stores for major brands such as Dyson and Adidas. It is considered.
Temu, Shein and TikTok may follow a similar strategy in the US. But Western shoppers already have their favorite websites and brands, and even Amazon's efforts to carve out a luxury space for brands have struggled to gain traction. Re-educating them to embrace Chinese-style e-commerce rather than just pursuing big-ticket items “would probably be orders of magnitude more expensive than China,” Weiss said.
“We need to convince American consumers to do things differently,” he said. “But the opportunity still exists…People want rich, immersive shopping discovery experiences that are mobile-optimized.”
