In May 2026, Temu ranked second among global e-commerce websites with 366 million unique visitors and 1.34 billion monthly visits, followed by Pinduoduo’s 100 billion-level “New Pinmu” self-operated underwriting plan.
These two things taken together mean that the cross-border e-commerce industry is undergoing a deep structural reshaping.
It is not simply “another platform”, but changes the rules of the game for China’s supply chain overseas from the underlying logic.
Let’s break it down from several key dimensions.
For the factory, uncertainty has been taken away by the platform for the first time.
In the past, what Chinese factories feared most when doing cross-border operations was not low profit margins, but unstable orders. This state of “hungry and full” prevented factories from investing in production line upgrades and process improvements.
Xinpinmu’s model directly reverses this.
The platform uses full buyout of inventory underwriting, and the annual scale of a single contract can reach tens of millions or even hundreds of millions of yuan. Part of the payment is paid in advance during the ordering stage.
The supplier’s gross profit margin is stable at 10%-20%. The only task is to make the product good according to the process standards given by the platform. There is no need to worry about whether it can be sold or not.
One detail is telling: Xinpinmu’s first batch of intended partners already include domestic head manufacturing brands such as Bosideng, Youngor, and Camel.
Suppliers have reported that this kind of certainty of long orders allows factories to dare to invest in research and development and process innovation, and the quality stability of the final products is much higher than the previous model of scattered docking with multiple small and medium-sized sellers.
This is different from SHEIN’s small order quick response – SHEIN factories have to share inventory risks with the platform; it is also different from Amazon’s self-operation – Amazon Basics only accounts for about 1% of Amazon’s sales, and its involvement is very shallow.
Xinpinmu completely internalizes supply chain risks from the factory side into platform responsibility.
From a competitive perspective, the industry-wide threshold has been significantly raised.
Temu’s ranking second in traffic is a signal in itself.
Its GMV growth rate in 2025 will be approximately 75% year-on-year, much higher than Amazon’s 12%.
Behind it, AliExpress’s brand GMV growth rate will exceed 40% in 2025, and TikTok Shop’s cross-border GMV in Southeast Asia will grow by 125%. The entire market has shifted from “Amazon’s unipolar dominance” to “multi-strong domain competition.”
Xinpinmu’s 100 billion investment has further raised the cost of competition.
In the past, cross-border platforms competed on traffic distribution and low-price attraction, but now it has become a competition on full-link efficiency + brand asset accumulation.
Amazon began to cut prices in Latin America, and AliExpress launched the Brand+ brand overseas plan-these are direct responses to the rise of Temu.
If small and medium-sized platforms cannot keep up with heavy asset investment (overseas warehouses, local fulfillment, brand incubation), their living space will continue to be squeezed.
A company that has been successful for three years by relying on “light” suddenly goes “heavy”, which itself shows that the underlying logic of the industry has changed.
Under the pressure of European and American policies, model transformation is inevitable.
Europe and the United States have successively canceled tariff exemptions for small packages worth $800 and less than 150 euros. The comprehensive cost of the traditional direct mail model has increased by more than 6 euros per order, and the proportion of direct mail has dropped from a peak of 60% to less than 25% in 2026.
Overseas warehouse stocking has become mainstream, and European warehouse capacity demand will double year-on-year in 2026.
On this track, whoever completes the establishment of a localized fulfillment network and brand premium capabilities first will be able to survive after tariff costs eat up the price advantage.
Xinpinmu’s terminal pricing is 4-5 times the production cost, and the final selling price is only 50-30% off similar overseas big-name products – this is not based on low prices, but on cost-effective quality supply achieved by compressing brand premiums.
For the living space of small and medium-sized sellers, differentiation is accelerating.
Xinpinmu’s model has completely different impacts on the two types of sellers.
Distribution-type sellers rely on massive SKUs and low prices to drive volume. Under the dual pressure of tariffs and compliance costs, profits have returned to zero. Products with a unit price of 10-20 euros have basically lost their survival space.
Such sellers will either shift to vertical categories with high customer unit prices, or move to emerging markets such as Latin America and Southeast Asia.
Boutique sellers are experiencing structural benefits.
Saiwei Times’ revenue will increase by 15% and net profit will increase by 32.17% in 2025; Zibuyu’s high-end brand line RQ revenue will increase by 1.9 times year-on-year.
The average price per customer of leading high-quality overseas merchants has increased by 1.2 times.
The supply chain quality upgrade brought about by the new Pinmu buyout model will eventually allow these sellers with brand operation capabilities to obtain better product supplies.
But the middle ground – those small and medium-sized factories that have neither brand capabilities nor scale advantages – are the most uncomfortable.
They used to be suppliers in Temu’s fully managed system. Now they face two choices: either upgrade their production lines and connect to Xinpinmu’s underwriting system (but they need to reach the threshold of annual revenue of several billion yuan), or they continue to be eliminated in the low-price involution.
Comprehensive judgment: Cross-border e-commerce has entered the second stage.
A joint research report by Goldman Sachs and McKinsey gives a key figure: the total number of Chinese cross-border brands going overseas will exceed 100,000 in 2028, and the top 10% of brand sellers will account for more than 70% of the industry’s profit share.
Xinpinmu’s 100 billion plan is essentially Pinduoduo using platform funds to buy a ticket for the “branding” of the supply chain – it transfers the logic of branding domestic agricultural products (Duoduo’s special product specialization) to the field of overseas industrial products.
But the risks are just as real.
Amazon has been operating its own brand for so many years, but Amazon Basics only accounts for 1% of the platform’s sales. Because the asset-heavy underwriting model requires extremely high product selection capabilities, if it cannot be sold, it will be lost to itself.
Xinpinmu is betting on its ability to judge “what sells well” and the time window for Chinese companies to shift from “low-price output” to “brand output”.
A turning point with no clear winner: For factories, firm orders have come, but brand ownership and pricing rights have been handed over; for consumers, they can buy products close to the quality of big brands at 50-30% off; for small and medium-sized sellers, they must either upgrade or be eliminated; for platforms, winning means “rebuilding Pinduoduo”, and losing means a 100 billion inventory backlog.
The only thing that is certain is that the way China’s cross-border e-commerce is played has never returned to what it used to be.
