Why Temu is growing faster than eBay in the UK — and what sellers should do about it

The UK marketplace landscape looked stable until about 2024. eBay was the dominant long-tail platform, Amazon was the default for new sellers, Shopify had quietly taken over DTC, and everything else (Etsy, OnBuy, Groupon) filled niches. Then Temu arrived, and for a meaningful slice of UK sellers the rank order changed quickly.

This piece looks at what's actually happening, why the inventory-software market hasn't caught up yet, and what that means if you're picking tools in 2026.

The numbers are real

Temu entered the UK market in earnest in mid-2023. By late 2025, its UK seller count had grown roughly 400% year-on-year (Temu's own reporting plus third-party tracking from Marketplace Pulse and JungleScout). Temu's GMV growth in the UK outpaced every other major marketplace in 2024 and H1 2025.

For context, eBay's UK GMV growth over the same period was low single digits, Amazon's was mid-to-high single digits, and Shopify's UK merchant growth was in the 10-15% range. Temu wasn't competing for the same pie — it was adding new sellers and new SKUs that other platforms weren't capturing.

Why Temu grew so fast

Three structural reasons that explain the velocity:

1. Subsidised customer acquisition. Temu poured advertising into UK customer acquisition on a scale that eBay and Amazon couldn't match. Low price points plus aggressive first-order discounts pulled in customers who would otherwise have bought on AliExpress or direct-from-China. These customers then stayed.

2. Low barrier to entry for sellers. Temu's onboarding for UK sellers is simpler than eBay's or Amazon's. No per-category application, minimal Brand Registry equivalent, and straightforward listing approval. Once you're in, Temu's algorithm gives new sellers more initial exposure than Amazon does.

3. Subsidised courier rates. Temu negotiates bulk courier contracts and passes the savings to sellers via their seller-portal label service. For small parcels (under 2kg), Temu's rates typically beat Evri or Royal Mail small-parcel by 20-40 pence. On 500 orders a day, that's meaningful margin.

The third point is the one that's most interesting for our readers — because it exposes the gap between Temu's offering and the inventory software market serving it.

The tooling gap

Temu's courier label service is only accessible through Temu's seller portal. To use the subsidised rate, you have to log into Temu, find the order, buy the label, print, come back to wherever you dispatch from. That's ~30 seconds per order of manual workflow.

At 50 Temu orders/day, 25 minutes. At 200 Temu orders/day, 1.7 hours. At 500, over 4 hours a day of your warehouse team doing mouse-clicks instead of picking and packing.

Every mature UK inventory platform — Linnworks, Brightpearl, Veeqo, Cin7, Sellbrite — can import Temu orders. None of them (as of April 2026) can buy Temu labels directly. The Temu courier API exists and is public, but the integration hasn't been on any of these platforms' roadmaps until very recently.

MaxInvent is the exception because our own team runs UK Temu stores. We built direct Temu courier label purchase because the workaround was costing us real time. It's the kind of feature that only gets built by people who feel the pain themselves.

Will the others catch up? Probably. The Temu API exists and is buildable. But roadmaps in enterprise SaaS move in quarters, not sprints — Linnworks' and Brightpearl's 2026 roadmaps were locked in 12 months ago, and adding a net-new integration takes 6-9 months from decision to GA. That's a window where sellers who care about Temu have a meaningful tool advantage by picking a platform that's built it.

What this means for sellers picking tools this year

If Temu is a significant channel for you today, the single biggest differentiator between inventory platforms is: can you buy Temu labels directly?

If Temu is a future channel for you — you're planning to start, or you're growing from low volume — the question becomes: which platform is most likely to have Temu label purchase live when you scale? Answer: the one that's already built it, or the one that's explicitly shipped it on a public roadmap.

If Temu is small and unlikely to grow (you're not the Temu-buyer profile, your margins don't work at Temu prices), the question doesn't matter much — pick for your main channels.

What's next

Three things to watch over the next 12-18 months:

1. Temu introducing its own FBA-equivalent. Rumoured for late 2026. If Temu starts fulfilling orders from their own UK warehouses (like Amazon FBA), it changes the inventory-platform game entirely — you'd push inventory in, not orders out.

2. Temu's seller-pricing algorithm maturing. Right now, Temu's approach to pricing is heavier-handed than Amazon's (they'll suggest or enforce prices on you). That friction will ease as Temu's UK seller base matures, but inventory platforms need to handle dynamic pricing well to keep up.

3. TikTok Shop's livestream model encroaching on Temu's territory. Both platforms compete for the same "impulse purchase, low price point" buyer. Whoever wins that competition shapes the tooling requirements for the next 3-5 years.

Bottom line

Temu isn't a fad. It's a structural shift in where low-cost UK ecommerce volume is flowing, and the tooling market has a 12-18 month lag. If you're picking a platform in 2026, the Temu integration depth is an under-the-radar question worth asking bluntly.

If you want the specifics on Temu courier label purchase, we wrote the detailed how-to guide and the platform comparison. Both are updated quarterly.