Who is buying that shit? I’ve never once heard someone say “look at this great thing I got on temu!”. I’ve literally only seen wish-fail stuff. It seems like a company that extracts pennies from putting shit directly into the landfill.
I haven’t bought from temu, but I’ve bought loads of stuff for various things on similar sites like aliexpress. If I have the time to wait for the shipping, it’s the exact same components as I buy in electronics supply stores here, but at a fraction of the price. I prefer to not pay a 300-400% markup for no real reason.
AliExpress (if you are not the person thiking you can get a 4TB SSD for 20€) is great.
It started off as a “for people” Alibaba.com and I have bought lots of quality stuff there including a phone, circuits, tools (not the best but they will probably outlive me), 3D printer stuff etc etc.
Temu is like wish, just crap.
Temu is more on par with wish. It’s really scanmy and disingenuous. Descriptions will claim one thing but send you some junk product instead.
AliExpress is a lot more legit. They’re still cheap products, but at least you know what you’re getting.
Anything you can find on Temu you could get from Ali, and usually even a bit cheaper, Temu just adds a predatory interface and false marketing on top of it, and people who have no experience with what Chinese manufacturing actually costs think it’s miraculous.
It isn’t, I’ve been buying this same stuff for almost two decades from sites like DealExpess, BangGood, Gearbest and then just straight from AliExpress. Temu is just the first to properly break through with the advertising. Because it’s mostly just bullshit.
It’s the exact same components I would have bought at a local store if there were any.
The last one closed almost 20 years ago. (Long before Temu, aliexpress and banggood)
I’d always thought there was a better use for the name Banggood than an electronic component store
I would say you should be free to make the decision to forego the advantages working though a middle man affords you, if you would prefer the savings. That said, there’s consumer protection, quality certification (important for insurance purposes), returns, after sales care and I’m sure I’m forgetting stuff. Nothing to do with differences in the product itself, more so the guarantee of a product that does what it says on the tin.
I use AliExpress for all the little items in my life that can fail without any real problem.
I need a comb and get 2/$1 to my door. $3/4/5 each in a physical store for the same. I don’t think you’re appreciating how often these are literally the same products.
The retail sector has long ago entered enshittification. I’m not blind to the real people working in the field, but paying more for a product does not increase the chance of any positive environmental or social outcome. Feeding the beast, feeds their investors.
There is no ethical consumption.
Tons of people. My wife bought a $7 digital camera off of there for one of our kids and 2 years later, both of our kids still love playing with it and it works perfectly fine. We’ve bought a couple of other toys off of there without issue. But yeah, the majority of the products on there are typically garbage.
Only thing I worry about with toys is if the plastic they use is non-toxic. Most cheap toys sold online aren’t tested for plastic toxicity.
True enough, but toxic toys aren’t super common in the US. It certainly happens, but they eventually get detected and recalled. That being said, with Trump’s plans for gutting regulatory bodies even further, I’ll be much less inclined to order cheap toys from online.
If your kid tries to eat their camera you have bigger issues to worry about.
My coworker is obsessed with Temu. He buys like 10 things, typically 8 of them are garbage and he returns them and 2 are fine which he keeps.
I’ve never heard him talk about great things he gets, but he’s constantly talking to me about “Look how little I paid for this thing!”
As a counterpoint, I’ve bought loads of really good cycling accessories from AliExpress. It’s not impossible to buy high-quality things from China - this is after all where a large part of everything is manufactured these days - you just have to be careful not to fall for the offers that are just obviously too good to be true.
I’ve met people that have gotten decent stuff off there. Their clothes seem nice and the electronics are hit and miss.
It’s about the same rate of crap to quality as EBay these days, and Amazon is only marginally better.
eBay is completely different though, since they have a lot of consumer protections, as well as a variety of services and used products. I got my phone on eBay used, which was about half the cost of buying new, and the phones was <6 months old. I also got a smart watch on eBay refurbished, again about half the price and there’s zero indication on the watch that it’s used or refurbished. I buy used Switch games (w/ case) on eBay as well, which aren’t as good of a deal, but I still routinely get them $30-40 when they’d normally retail for $50-60.
You can buy utter crap on eBay, but you can also buy high quality used products. On Amazon, those same used products tend to be about 10% more expensive (my experience), and Temu just doesn’t have anything similar.
If you’re after cheap everyday items, shop at your local dollar store or buy on AliExpress. If you’re after new electronics, wait until one of the regular sales (usually holiday season and tax season), or shortly after the next version launches, and then shop online (lots of retailers). If you’re after used electronics, check your local classifieds, and fall back to eBay.
At no point is Temu on my list of options.
You’ve clearly never lost a dispute on eBay. It’s possibly the worst customer experience I’ve had.
I needed a glass part for a projector, it showed up broken. Tried to send it back and the seller offered like a 10% refund. eBay…after waiting a week (mandatory dispute resolution time) showed up, spent another week trying to meditate, the just said fuck it, the seller is right, eat a dick and your broken color wheel.
eBay gives you the illusion of consumer protection until you actually need it.
But no, based on some of the car parts and things I’ve gotten off eBay…the quality is objectively not better than what I’ve seen off Temu.
Temu is insanely popular. Don’t underestimate this. Yes, it’s pure crap, but people buy it. They earn bucks.
Meaning, it’s not a valid argument to say it’s crap, and then it’s not a problem. Temu is a problem.
But then we have to start another discussion about the free market, because then Temu is valid.
Then what? Legit question, I don’t have the answer to.
The thing is that it’s not PURE crap.
It’s kind of like going to a flea market. Most of it is crap and you can still find some decent and good stuff that’s way cheaper than it should be.
I don’t need to guess. I know from having been to China and having talked to people.
It’s mostly a combination of 3 things:
- Tons of infrastructure. If you decide to start manufacturing some random thing you can easily get all the stuff you need to get started.
- Regulations are generally very favorable to small startups and businesses. This is partly why so much of the stuff on Temu is crap.
- A huge population. That’s the main source of ultra cheap labor. Farmers in rural China can still make as little as $1.90 per day. All a factory owner needs to offer is more than that and they’ll have a line of applicants.
I got some temu stuff. A 7$ bag heat sealer. Works perfectly fine.
However, I do not abide surveillance pricing. I can defeat the surveillance pricing but the procedure annoys me, so I’ve gone back to aliexpress which is easier to defeat.
What is surveillance pricing? Are they like using cookies to subtley raise the price on thing you’re searching for?
Things like using surveillance to figure out when your payday is and raising prices (just for you, and just on that day) because you psychologically are more willing to spend in that moment
Any tips on defeating aliexpress pricing? I stopped buying because everything was up so much.
It’s a process for me, I open hundreds of tabs, save all URLs, strip trackers from URLs, remove duplicates, then I reload all tabs into a fresh, empty multiaccount container, then I use a scraper addon called gatherfromtabs to pickup all the prices, then I log and setup everything up to the last page of the sale, I tally up all the totals in excel, order by price, usually 100s of ads, find the absolute 3 cheapest ones, review the ads really thoroughly to avoid scams and then buy 10-20x of whatever this item was to make it worth my time.
This process will become more difficult over time.
ya with how expensive plastic crap is nowadays in most stores, why not just buy from a place that sells the same thing that represents more closely to the price of manufacturing them? Of course I wouldn’t buy any tech stuff from there, but a simple plastic container? Temu for sure!
Yeah, everyone is “a business owner” by selling temu crap all over the place now.
Even farmers markets with wealthy looking white people selling garbage mugs and tchotchkes that are all clearly from China.
Someone else did all the work and they think they are special for pushing it on others. Heck so many ads these days are for sites selling the shovels in this gold rush for making your own drop shipping site on tiktok. What else is Shopify?
I don’t see why it would only be Chinese immigrants doing it.
It’s all over the place.
It’s all fun and games until you’re left with a bunch of crap you can’t sell, or it turns out you were shipping dangerous products and now you’re on the hook for it.
Enjoy your 5% profits though.
Temu is like NAFTA for American “business” people.
You cut out the factory worker first, then cut out the American importer.
But the U.S. government’s moves to crack down on cheap e-commerce parcels from China have pushed sellers to rethink their business strategies.
So, there’s the problem then. If they made it all more expensive for the American consumer, then that solves the problem. /s
On a serious note: it’s obviously cheaper because there’s no physical shop with no staff. Isn’t this how Bezos started out, from a garage?
