What Is DHgate? App Surges in Popularity, but Might Not Be Helpful Against Tariffs
Published on: 2025-08-12 03:00:00
President Donald Trump's contentious barrage of tariffs has people asking a lot of questions: What will they actually do to prices? Should I make that big purchase now? However, one question the White House probably didn't see coming is consumers wondering how they can do more shopping from China. And the answer to that might be DHgate.
On April 16, the Chinese shopping service DHgate boasted the second-most downloaded free app on Apple's App Store, behind only OpenAI's ChatGPT. According to a report from Yahoo Finance, the previous week, it was 352nd on the same list, indicating a stratospheric rise in popularity largely attributed to popular TikTok creators advocating for the e-commerce platform as a way to buy directly from China. As of April 25, it was still the 12th most popular shopping app on the App Store.
So what is DHgate precisely? It's an online shopping platform based in China that has been around since 2004. Similar in function and appearance to other popular sites like
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