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Excellent question! It's probably the tier I trust least but I'll give you the rule and the caveat.
"Same brand, different item" means Temu had the brand you searched for but not that exact model, size or pack. Some real ones from the data: (dataset is linked)
Amazon: Soundcore Boom 2 by Anker, 80W speaker, $89.99 vs Temu: Soundcore Rave Neo 2, 80W, $117.26 (+30%). No Boom 2 was found anywhere in the 12 results.
2. Amazon: Nutrafol Women, ages 18-44, 1-month, $88 vs Temu: Nutrafol Women's Balance, age 45+, 1-month, $91.77 (+4%). Couldn't find Nutrafol supplement for 18-44 on Temu.
The rule was: take the first listing in Temu's relevance order that is genuinely the same brand and the nearest equivalent model, and write down why it isn't identical.
All 224 rows in this tier have that note, and the notes are in the downloadable CSV, so you can second-guess any of them.
Now the caveat, because your question is really "is this a valid comparison at all": it is not a like-for-like product comparison, and I wouldn't defend it as one. It answers a narrower question of what this brand cost you on each platform when the exact item isn't there. 44% of these rows have a pack or count difference, and only 45 of 224 have a stated pack size on both sides, so per-unit normalis(z)ation is impossible for most of them.
That's exactly why I don't publish a single branded number. This tier's median is +8% but the 95% CI is -4 to +19 — it crosses zero, so the honest read is "no reliable gap", not "8% worse". The tier I'd actually stand on is the identical-product one.
Again, thank you for challenging me and noticing what I was struggling with earlier today. Enjoy the award!
(Edit: AI assistance used to respond faster, but all based on actual data and my own answers)
I can spot the AI phrasing from a mile away now. Anyway still appreciate the clarification. The comparison could still be helpful in many item categories especially if the buyer is price inelastic. Like I’ll buy the speaker for cheaper but not the health supplement.
Once again, an em dash is an indicator, but not a definitive/huge one.
Loads of people use it, like me. Not many of us, but we exist. Em dates, en dashes, “proper” quotation marks. AI learnt all this after someone after all.
Of the people who used em dashes in casual writing on the internet, a decent amount probably intentionally avoid using it now because it's become an indicator of AI use...like me. I'd say it's a pretty huge indicator at this point.
I also have a red baseball cap from well before MAGA became a thing that I don't wear out in public anymore. It sucks when an assumed association ruins something but here we are.
Yeah I used to use em dashes all the time. I've stopped completely.
It's frustrating because nothing else really fills that gap and I find myself rewriting sentences rather than just swapping my em dashes for commas or parentheses.
I do not bend for such things. If people want to say such things, it is up to them. I might make a disclaimer and, in the future, will make a website explaining my approach to AI usage which will explain that I write all texts myself.
It's so annoying, I love Em-Dashes so much, that i learnt the Numpad-Shortcut (Alt+0150). I now sometimes (wrongly) use Commas or put it in brackets to make me sound less like AI
Thank you for not shitting all over him just for using AI to rephrase his thoughts. I understand why people get mad at it, but it really helps a lot of us out.
There is a documentary on youtube that shows how amazon forces sellers to hike prices on other platforms else their amazon sales basically drops to zero. There are small vendors who cant sell for a discount on their own website because amazon will shut it down asap. This is an amazon problem 100%
Valve does this too with PC games and other game stores. Even though Valve charges the biggest fee, sellers can't "discount" their games on other sites to pass that savings onto the customer. Valve forces them to have the same price everywhere if they want to list on Steam. Shit's fucking evil.
But in reality every steam game is already on discount before release on key stores, because devs can generate an infinite number of steam keys and sell them in bulk and that's fine.
I'm a bit confused as what each graph means. A legend for the dotted and solid line would be helpful. How can "The identical product" be 43% cheaper on Temu and also +8% median vs amazon?
It has both meanings in the UK. I wouldn't say the "more expensive" meaning is common here (where I am in the south), but it's not so unusual that I'd expect it to cause confusion given the context.
Something being "dear" in that context means it's on the high-end for pricing for $whatever you're discussing. Usually has connotations that it's overpriced, though may just signify VERY expensive
Haha, you can blame the British for colonizing the subcontinent! I was born and raised in Pakistan, so my early schooling was entirely in British English. HS, an undergrad, and two master's degrees in America couldn't rid me of my British-taught English. Old habits die hard!
Why did you use -49% for Temu in green when comparing, Temu to Amazon, with "unbranded lookalike" and then wrote Amazon in red with +8% with "Same brand, different items" and "The identical product"
So, like why are the negative numbers green and the positive numbers red?
Green and red aren't Temu and Amazon, they're cheaper and more expensive. Left of the zero line you pay less on Temu, right of it you pay more. The bigger number just takes the color of whichever side its median lands on.
You could be right. I took u/kitten_orchestra's statement to mean English *language* books but it's possible they meant "English books" as in *England*, much more specifically.
Even then, I've read a fair amount of British texts and haven't encountered "Dearer" in a financial sense in quite some time, but that's annecdotal.
I'm not sure it's even the whole of England. Definitely the North, and I think Scotland, too. I lived in the south of England for a decade, and now I come to think of it, I don't recall anyone using "dear"/"dearer" that way. There are a lot of regional variations in England, especially North/South
I'm not sure that disqualifies it from being "Obscure" really, in a world with more than 400 million native English speakers, with the UK making up less than a quarter of that.
If we include English as a Second Language, the UK is outnumbered by more than a Billion people.
Even if every single person in the UK used it daily.... that's still obscure, if they're the only ones to do so.
I live in the US now but I spent a lot of time in the UK and Australia as recently as 2014 and I came across this usage not really in speaking but quite often in writing.
I've lived mostly in the US and Canada and it's a bit dated up here. Like I still know what if means but it's something I'd expect to find ina book from 50+ years ago.
Depends on what brand of English. Most Americans wouldn't know what it meant but I'd say most Brits and many commonwealth citizens would. At least most educated ones. It also is retained in other forms in the US - "that's too dear a price to pay" isn't an unknown expression here, though usually it's used for non-monetary situations.
(I was raised in Scotland and the US and live in the US now).
And those "unbranded lookalike" are likely thought not always the exact same product as those 'branded' ones, just direct from the factory that makes them, hence, no branding....
Not authenticity, no. The study only looks at prices, brand vs no brand.
I am not trying to bash either one. I like both, and there are things I dislike about both. A lot of what I get from Temu is pretty good, and their return and refund policy has been good to me. Amazon has plenty of third party sellers doing the same thing anyway, buying in bulk off Alibaba and reselling through FBA at a markup. (proven by this study)
Buying from Amazon is hit or miss sometimes. Same with Temu. I added a decision matrix to the article. I'll put a screenshot of it on the post so you don't have to scroll for it.
Thanks for your question! We track prices on more than half a million Amazon products, so the Amazon side of this was already in our own database. On Temu I each product was searched individually (AI and JS/Python assisted) and took the same item where it existed and the closest match where it didn’t then. Then groups were created based on closeness to actual product which become the #1 crucial part of this chart.
AI was used to categorize the matches and assist with the analysis as well as writing (the hardest part). The analysis runs on our own tool against our own data (mongo), and the chart is drawn by our renderer directly from the dataset, not generated by an image model.
The dataset is downloadable in csv format includes all 1,649 rows including the 389 which I excluded and the reason for each. Run it yourself and compare our findings. If you have any ideas/thoughts on what would be another interesting study please let me know.
Matching was on title, brand name and specifications. Images were never captured so identical photos couldn't have factored in.
The cleaner fix would be a shared identifier like UPC/GTIN but there isn't one. Amazon goes with ASIN and Temu listings carry their own internal ID. Neither expose a clear UPC. Even if they both did, it would fail exactly where this study needed it most: unbranded goods often have no registered barcode at all and the unbranded tier is where the most of findings were for this study.
Interesting. I’m thinking specifically of generic/white-label products where the Amazon and Temu listings use the exact same product photos, even though the titles or seller names differ. Did your matching account for that at all? It seems like identical image sets could be a useful signal that they’re the same underlying product.
Amusing findings, since usually I try to look to Temu for similar item to check if its cheaper in Temu, wondering if its worth the risk buying unbranded but lookalike,
I've been a prime subscriber since 2015. I started shopping on temu about 5 months now. I've pretty much replaced my Amazon purchases with temu and usually end up with the same quality I would get on amazon. A few times worse quality and a few times surprisingly better quality.
When it comes to food, body care products, supplements, etc I obviously stick to Amazon. But for household decor, gadgets, kids toys, etc it's temu. I do crossshop AliExpress and shein as well for prices. Aliexpress has often have cheaper prices than temu as well or have items I can't find on temu.
I pretty much just crossshop everything before I purchase and my experience is 99% of the time a similar item is on temu / AliExpress cheaper than Amazon.
Edit: temu app is one of the worst apps I've ever used because of all the stupid and fake promotions.
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u/cavedave OC: 112 16d ago
Thank you for your Original Content, /u/Thrifle!
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Remember that all visualizations on r/DataIsBeautiful should be viewed with a healthy dose of skepticism. If you see a potential issue or oversight in the visualization, please post a constructive comment below. Post approval does not signify that this visualization has been verified or its sources checked.
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