Since 2022, Mariana Garfias Torres, a 30-year-old nutritionist, has been making an additional income by selling housewares from Betterware, a Mexican catalog company. She regularly circulates Betterware’s digital catalog to her close acquaintances, books their orders, and both makes a profit and earns a commission on the sales.

Lately, though, her offering has included clothes and accessories from SheiniSheinFounded in China in 2008 and headquartered in Singapore, Shein is a fast fashion brand that grew rapidly through exposure on social media.READ MORE. Her customers send her screenshots of items they see on the Shein app, and she places the orders.

“Now that Shein and Temu have more ads [on social media], I’ve seen they are putting out more innovative and cheaper products than Betterware,” Garfias Torres told Rest of World. “My customers have noticed too.”

As Chinese e-commerce platforms have gained popularity in the country, some of the 3.1 million people who work in the catalog sales industry have incorporated the platforms’ products into their stock. Bitácora Social, a research center focused on societies and business, estimates that six out of 10 catalog sellers in Mexico now sell products from online platforms. By doing this, the sellers — mostly low- or middle-income housewives over the age of 45 who frequently interact with their customers in person — have inadvertently contributed to the slow demise of catalog sales companies in Mexico, according to industry insiders.

The inclusion of Shein and Temu products in catalog sellers’ offerings “is definitely something that the direct sales companies have been looking to offset or contain,” Fernando Jiménez Velázquez, former director of communications and content at Tupperware and former treasurer of the Mexican Association of Direct Sales, or AMVD, told Rest of World.

Many catalog sellers who often share their catalogs through WhatsApp and Facebook now include photos of items from Temu and Shein. One group on Facebook with 149 members advertises items from Betterware, Tupperware, Shein, and Temu. Potential clients scroll through the apps or PDF catalogs, screenshot the items they like, and send them to the seller on WhatsApp along with a down payment. They pay the remainder when they receive their purchase some 20 days later, delivered by the catalog seller herself.

According to a study from the Mexican Association of Online Sales, or AMVO, some people are hesitant to shop online out of fear of being scammed. To curb these worries, Mexicans often buy through intermediaries, like the catalog sellers, with whom they’ve built a trusting relationship through regular in-person interactions.

Lizbeth Sánchez, who works as an office secretary in the state of Mexico, started buying and reselling Shein items to her colleagues in 2022. “After that, I built a [Facebook] page to reach more people,” Sánchez told Rest of World. As her business grew, she added two catalogs to her offering, Betterware and Concord, a bedding and home decoration company.

Women like Sánchez “are selling the practicality of buying for a population that cannot or does not want to shop online,” María del Pilar Montero, senior researcher at Bitácora Social, told Rest of World.

Shein, the most common of these, and Temu, a similar app, have been among the top three most downloaded apps in the shopping category in Mexico for the past year, according to Data.ai, an app analytics company.

The catalog sales or direct sales business model, in which individuals buy products from a parent company and sell them directly to consumers, was pioneered by companies like Mary Kay, Tupperware, and Betterware in the U.S. and the U.K. In Mexico, the most popular brands include Andrea, Price Shoes, and Natura, a Brazilian beauty and fragrance giant who also owns Avon. The latter declared bankruptcy last August in the midst of hundreds of lawsuits alleging the use of cancer-causing ingredients in its products.

Most catalog sellers are housewives or have full-time jobs and are drawn to this line of work because of the flexibility it affords them. But many complain about the long hours it takes to pick up merchandise from warehouses, deliver it to clients, and collect cash payments.

Guadalupe Bucio, a 56-year-old housewife and catalog seller from Puebla, told Rest of World that she usually spends three days a week collecting payments from her customers and visiting the warehouses to pick up their orders. She delivers the items in person, sometimes spending at least 15 minutes on each visit because her customers are either busy or want to chat.

Selling online products allows them to use a delivery service, bypassing the time-consuming in-person visits.

“With Shein, these women are making the orders on demand whenever they want, with the payment method they want, and with faster delivery methods,” Erick Padilla, founder and CEO of Aida, a WhatsApp sales assistant for online sellers, told Rest of World.

We noticed our usual sellers began buying from Shein and Temu, who sell infinitely cheaper products, and reselling them.”

Padilla’s company services around 160 catalog sellers in Mexico City and neighboring states who have incorporated Shein products into their inventories. Aida provides them with a personalized payment link for each customer so they can pay in full or installments with either a credit or debit card, bank transfer, or cash deposit. The links are sent through WhatsApp, which keeps sellers from in-person visits and improves payment collection.

While Shein and Temu sales have increased efficiency among some catalog saleswomen, they have also put a dent in the catalog sales industry, according to four industry executives.

For two decades, Daniel Bojmal led Catálogo Incógnita, a catalog company that sold shoes, clothes, and housewares. Incógnita had been growing sales by double digits year to year, but in 2022, when Temu entered the country and Shein’s popularity skyrocketed, he began struggling to find saleswomen for his company’s products.

“We noticed our usual sellers began buying from Shein and Temu, who sell infinitely cheaper products, and reselling them,” Bojmal told Rest of World. Little storefronts selling these companies’ products started popping up in the communities where Bojmal’s customers lived. The women ditched Bojmal’s PDF and print catalogs and began focusing on their purchases on Shein’s and then Temu’s apps.

By the end of 2023, Bojmal’s sales had dropped by 30%. “We had to make the decision to close before it bled us out financially,” he said.

Another catalog company called Aditivo cut down its catalog business by over 90% in 2023, in large part because it wasn’t able to compete with prices from Shein or Temu, Edmond Charabati, the company’s chief operating officer, told Rest of World. Aditivo’s brick-and-mortar stores are still operational.

While catalog company owners struggle with competition from online platforms, sellers claim they’re just responding to their customers’ changing preferences. “I still sell a lot of Betterware items to my older customers, but younger ones want Shein and Temu,” Garfias Torres said. “Betterware has like 50 items, but Shein has an inventory that doesn’t seem to end.”