President Donald Trump’s tariff rollercoaster has had many unexpected impacts—including threatening the sex toy industry and possibly making smartphones dumber. But the most recent odd aftershock from his yo-yoing decisions on whether to instigate tariff hikes against China has been good news for a previously little-known app called DHgate.
The app has shot to near the top of the App Store charts this week, according to Sensor Tower, an analyst firm. Its success is (practically) overnight: last week, it couldn’t even crack the 100 most popular apps on Apple’s rankings.
But what is it, why is it popular—and, perhaps most importantly, should you use it? DHgate’s media relations team did not immediately respond to WIRED’s request to participate in this story, but e-commerce experts have shared with us their thoughts.
What Is DHgate and Where Did It Come From?
Since 2004, DHgate has helped connect foreign buyers with Chinese manufacturers. The initials in its name is a reference to Dunhuang, a city once famed for its role in China’s ancient Silk Road trade route.
“I remember I used to buy imported DVDs of Chinese films that you can’t buy elsewhere,” says Arnold Ma, a Chinese e-commerce expert and founder and CEO of Qumin, an UK-based marketing agency specializing in Chinese audience behaviours. “They’ve always been more of a B2B business, but before Alibaba became popular, for global merchants to get stock from China cheaply and in bulk.”
The company behind it, DHgate Group, was founded by female entrepreneur and former Microsoft and Cisco employee Wang Shutong, and has since grown into a behemoth: as of late 2023, 77 million registered buyers across almost every country and region in the world, around 10 million of whom have reportedly bought from 2.6 million sellers in China and elsewhere. However, some of these claims ought to be taken with a pinch of salt. Implausibly, DHgate claims buyers are located in more “countries and regions” than there are countries in the world.
Why Is DHgate Popular Now?
The growing trend of Chinese e-commerce manufacturers marketing their wares on apps like TikTok and its Chinese equivalent, Douyin, in response to Donald Trump’s tariffs against China, has raised awareness of DHgate among the public. “It’s recently got popular thanks to TikTok,” says Ma. “People are starting to wonder with the tariffs whether they can buy items from China directly.”
Those viral videos, made by representatives of factories that claim to make products for luxury goods retailers, suggested people could counter the price increases coming from tariffs by buying unbadged versions of the same products direct from them on DHgate at a much lower cost—though there are serious questions about whether the sellers are legitimately suppliers to luxury western brands. Search interest spiked in the last week as a result, with “China ‘Exposes’ Luxury Brands” now a trending topic on TikTok. “They’ve always wanted to dabble in B2C,” says Ma.
How Does DHgate Work?
Like almost every other shopping app, you download, log on and search for items—but you can also access the marketplace via the company’s website. DHgate categorizes the products it sells on behalf of manufacturers into different groups, while you can also search for specific items using the search bar at the top of the page. A search for “laptop” returns more than 73,000 results.
Many of these are unbranded items; countless others are dupes of recognizable ones. Befitting its history as a business-to-business retailer, you can get discounts for buying in bulk.
As with any online retail transaction, it’s worth checking reviews of individual items, and ratings for the sellers in question: DHgate is a marketplace, not a supplier itself. “It’s not as good as it says on TikTok videos,” says Ma. “There are still quite a lot of scammers, and there’s a lot of cases where people don’t get the product that they paid for. But when you do your research, and you do go to the right merchants on DHgate, you do genuinely get really good quality products that are 80 percent the same, made in the same factories for a lot less.”
Is It Safe to Buy from DHgate?
There’s no suggestion that buying items from DHgate is a risk when it comes to data collection: the platform is longstanding and a recognized name, so your credit card details are likely to be no less safe than they are on any other Chinese e-commerce platform. The app also has a buyer protection program, and holds payments from sellers until buyers acknowledge receipt of their order—making it less likely you’ll be scammed.
Whether the goods you receive will be top-notch quality is another question. Prior to this month, DHgate was best known as a “prolific destination for designer knockoffs”, as news organizations have previously described it. In the past, WIRED has also called DHgate “one of the most established purveyors of counterfeits from China.” Indeed, if you do purchase counterfeit goods on DHgate, it could mean bought items end up seized by customs before reaching your home.
