Temu as non-marginalized resistance: Reconfiguring communicative affordances in global e-commerce

Temu’s rapid development in global e-commerce challenges long-standing platform hierarchies dominated by Amazon and eBay. This study conceptualizes non-marginalized resistance to understand how structurally empowered platforms from the Global South are strategically resisting dominant communicative affordance regimes. Methodologically, platform historiography was adopted to explore how Temu reconfigures platform standards through three dimensions: infrastructural affordance rooted in its advanced logistical system, a gamified ecosystem affordance that reshapes consumer engagement, and adaptive global strategies responsive to globalized market contexts. By connecting communicative affordances analysis with marketing communication scholarship, this study demonstrates how platform affordances, along with infrastructural structure and institutional strategies, jointly shape consumer engagement and experience on e-commerce platforms. Temu thus exemplifies how platforms, as active agents of resistance, reshape the logic of global e-commerce, even as such non-marginalized resistance may reproduce new asymmetries of power and remain under growing geopolitical and tariff pressures.