Shein: The TikTok of Ecommerce

Everyone knows that China is good at manufacturing. That’s been true for decades. What’s changed is that over the past five years, Chinese companies have caught up, and in some cases surpassed, the rest of the world in its understanding of mobile ecommerce consumer experience.

The ability to manufacture quality, trend-responsive clothing quickly and sell it at low prices feeds into the front-end of the business, where Shein’s user experience kicks in to create addictiveness.Building an addictive fashion mobile ecommerce experience comes down to four things:

• Low prices


• Great pictures


• Lots and lots of reviews, with pictures a

... See more

Anyone who can predict demand more accurately, test more nimbly, and dial up production of popular SKUs faster than others, thereby reducing waste, inefficiencies and markdowns, will hold a huge advantage over competitors.

“Shein is so far ahead of its direct (fashion industry) competitors that it's difficult to even compare them.” It’s essentially defining its own category, which Matthew has coined Real-Time Retail.

Shein’s strength comes from taking China’s advantages, and applying them to the global market.

Based on taps, clicks, and sales, an algorithm doubles the production quota, which is immediately updated on the factory floor with extra materials automatically ordered. A second algorithm updates the weightings and recommends the item to more users with similar profiles.

Shein combines parts of Apple and Amazon to build its compounding advantage. Like Apple, it controls its entire value chain, from the factory floor to the Shein app. Building a strong brand and user experience should allow it to charge premium prices, like Apple, but instead, it chooses to consistently delight customers through lower prices, like A... See more

Shein doesn’t have a style. It doesn’t try to impose its taste on global consumers. It doesn’t even have its own taste. It’s a mirror that reflects each country’s current style back to it, in real-time, based on data alone. Remaining generic, storyless, and nationless allows it to project whichever image is needed in the moment on its loose army of... See more

These companies follow a playbook originally written by Amazon: serve the needs of users within a single high-frequency purchase category, and use that category as a beachhead from which to expand vertically (brands) and horizontally (categories).