ByteDance, the owner of TikTok, has jumped into the race to use online stores to sell products created in China to Western buyers. The Beijing-based internet company has redesigned its cross-border operations with a new fast fashion budget store called If Yooou. 

If Yooou's design initially recalls other fast fashion websites like Shein and Pinduoduo's Temu, which also have landing pages with selections of cheap goods. Currently, If Yooou focuses on women's fast fashion that caters to Western clients, including the UK, France, Germany, Italy, and other European nations.

If Yooou only sells online and doesn't have any physical storefronts. Its product offerings are also the same as those of Shein and Temu, which provide cheap women's clothing including dresses, shoes, trendy tops, and accessories. Most clothing items are priced under £30, and some sale items even go for less than £6. Consumers can refund and return merchandise without giving a reason within 30 days of receiving an item. If Yooou's warehouses ship orders to customers in less than 15 days after they are placed.

It's not the first time ByteDance has forayed into international e-commerce with websites offering reasonably cost products. The company released similar apps  last year called Dmonstudio and Fanno, neither of which was successful in meeting expectations in international markets.

Dmonstudio claimed that it updates over 500 items weekly and guarantees that it can deliver items to customers in as little as 5 business days. Similar to Shein, Dmonstudio attempted to move from design, manufacture, to landing pages of women's outfit as quickly as possible in an effort to keep up with rapidly evolving fashion trends. It turns out, though, that the well-known quick fashion online company was merely a dud. Dmonstudio declared its closure in February 2022, just three months after it began operations.

Fanno, a comprehensive shopping site ByteDance released ahead of last year’s Black Friday event on November 26, is teetering on the brink of termination.

As a part of ByteDance’s cross-border e-commerce initiatives, ByteDance burnt cash to grow Fanno’s user base. One of Fanno’s generous promotion had new users choose a big discount product that costs as cheap as USD0.01, receive free shipping with no minimum order value, and a discount coupon. 

In order to meet different customer demand, the e-commerce platform has also hired a team of customer service representatives with different cultural backgrounds and who speak different language. It seems that Fanno had a decent start, as the app had slowly climbed up the ranks of the world’s popular apps. However, its brand image had not built up as much as ByteDance expected it would be. While no official statement was given for the closure of Fanno, the app has not been updated for over a month since April 2022. There has also been an increasing number of complaints with regard to the platform’s logistics, product quality, and refund procedure, some media reports speculated that the team of Fanno project has been dissolved by ByteDance as early as April.

By launching a brand-new site, ByteDance delivers a clear message that the failure of two fast fashion womenswear brands has not stopped its ambition to expand into the cross-border sector. However, If Yooou will face stiff challenges not only from peers like Shein and ByteDance’s Temu, but also from U.S e-commerce giant Amazon. ByteDance is relatively late to the e-commerce scene.

As the business unit of Pinduoduo, Temu was born with a vast network of merchants and manufacturers at its disposal. This has ensured Temu to immediately provide products at an attractive price as soon as it launches service in the target markets.

Since it was founded in 2008 by Chris Xu, Shein had built up strong foundations in the supply chain with years of valuable experience gained from a large number of successful and failed attempts. After orders are placed, items are sent from Shein’s warehouse in Foshan, Guangdong province, to a warehouse near Los Angeles and then shipped out via USPS; the whole process normally takes no more than seven business days.

Unlike Shein and Temu, which are a natural fit to e-commerce, if Yooou will need to build the brand reputation versus the likes of Shein and Amazon, it could also suffer from its relatively long shipping times versus the same-day or next-day deliveries Amazon offers through its Prime subscription services. if Yooou could also be dragged into the price war, Shein and Temu focus on budget consumers by offering cheap products.

Temu’s edge over its rivals could be its extensive connections with influencers thanks to the huge popularity of TikTok in Western countries. Like Shein, whose success contributed partly to its social media marketing strategies, ByteDance can take advantage of the huge user base of TikTok with influencers routinely promoting if Yooou’s brand and products via short video heavily marketed on TikTok.