Yiheng Battery joined Temu and found a new channel for 100 daily orders

In fall 2022, sales at Yiheng Battery were stagnating. The Yiwu factory had sold button-cell batteries for 30 years, but the pandemic and weak Chinese economy had reduced spending. Huang Qianqian left a technology job to help her parents' business.

Friends told Huang about Temu, the new U.S.-focused platform owned by PDD Holdings. She convinced her parents to join in December, choosing the channel as a low-barrier way to reach foreign customers rather than relying on a slowing domestic market.

The move produced a measurable, if imperfect, result: Yiheng Battery was receiving around 100 orders a day from Temu, while Huang said margins were very small. The first experiment nonetheless shifted the family toward cross-border growth; she was already considering pet products on TikTok Shop.

Temu opened an international sales channel that brought Yiheng Battery around 100 orders a day, although cutthroat pricing left very little profit.

Temu's launch coincided with weak domestic demand and a need for Chinese factories to find new orders.

The platform reduced the burden of building an overseas storefront, marketing operation, and fulfillment system from scratch.

Huang could use the family's existing manufacturing base to test international demand before making a larger expansion bet.

When a home market stalls, a low-friction platform can test overseas demand quickly; volume is not the same as a durable margin.

Yiheng Battery had moved from domestic stagnation to a live overseas sales channel, but the economics remained unresolved. Huang was already looking at TikTok Shop as a second experiment, showing that the first platform became a bridge to broader cross-border ambitions rather than a final answer.